Gallery Hyundai New York Project Space is pleased to announce Pass through the city, a solo presentation of Park Hyunki (1942–2000). Known as a pioneering figure in Korean video art, Park’s wide-ranging work encompassed video, installation, prints, painting, drawing, performance, sculpture, and a method he innovated and coined as “photo-media.” This exhibition brings to life Park’s one major performance, Pass Through the City (1981), through a set of three videos and 24 photographs alongside archival materials. The project was originally staged as a large-scale performance traversing the streets of Daegu (a city in southeast Korea) on a 50-feet-long trailer truck for forty minutes, and exhibited as a combination of large artificial stones, video playback, photography, and installation at Maekhyang Gallery—the first hybrid media project in Korean art history which dismantled boundaries between the exhibition space and the urban environment outside.

Epitomized by his frequent use of stones, inspired by a childhood memory of seeing stone towers (doltap) while fleeing the Korean War, Park took a marked interest in rediscovering a Korean aesthetic and its philosophical sensibilities through the relational effects and the collision between natural and virtual environments, and between found objects and fabricated materials. As a result, his often site-specific and ephemeral constructions test the integrative possibilities of new media such as video, as well as challenge the premise of permanence and passive looking that exists in historical Western canonical work.

This ambitious exhibition, indexing a space and time that is dissonant from New York of the present, offers an alternate lineage of video art where technology is demystified and exists as one of many media embedded in the matrix of human perception and experience. Furthermore, at a moment when Korean modern and contemporary art begins to enter mainstream discourse in North America, this presentation of Park seeks to further bolster Gallery Hyundai Project Space's mission of highlighting complex and non-linear relationships between individual artists such as Park Hyunki, artistic movements, and socio-political history, offering a mirror for our present by extension.