As crucial it was for Park Hyunki to have felt compelled to create new media work after viewing Nam June Paik’s video art in 1974, Park’s approach to video and technology rather resembles the thriving interests of objects and materiality in Korean art of the 1970s.
Park Hyunki’s major early works encompass polarities between untouched and engaged, and doing and non-doing. The works include Untitled (TV Stone Tower) (1979-1996), his most representative video stone tower from 1984, in which he started to combine stones with TV monitors. Video Inclining Water (1979) is a photograph documentation of a performance where Park tilts the video monitor in coordination to the static video image of water to give the spectator an illusion as if the monitor was filled with water. Untitled (1993) is composed of wood, stones and single-channel video inspired by his long-time subject, his own hands. For Park, hands not only delineated the five senses but also symbolized the five elements of the universe. Art achieved its true importance when he was in a quest to harmonize humanity with the universe.
