J.PARK's 2017 CCTV Project on Maze of Onlookers

  

LEEAHN Gallery is delighted announce its participation in the Art Basel Hong Kong Insight 2017. This
interactive art project for Art Basel Hong Kong Insight 2017 is a video installation work consisting of 18
CCTV monitors by the Korean artist, J. PARK.

 

PARK's installation art project "Maze of Onlookers" presents CCTV images broadcast in a sculptural structure.  This work explores the constant and random mass exposure prevalent in today’s surveillance culture.  It asks viewers to experience and question the intertwined relationship between security and privacy and our ambivalent attitudes towards this complicated and risky dilemma.  Compared to other contemporary artists’ CCTV works that focus more on the limited realm of social surveillance, PARK's work seeks to mine deeper psychological and philosophical questions.  PARK's CCTV images are used not just to report on the risks of the surveillance society but also to guide the audiences to synesthetically experience the ambiguous reality where mass exposure and surveillance create complicated structures beyond our imagination and where the distinction between protection and surveillance becomes blurred and where we all become consumers of the random voyeurism that these images serve.

  

PARK's work also ponders important existential and phenomenological questions. The audiences captured by the camera are presented simultaneously in both real-time and time-lagged images. The experience of seeing oneself as objects of the past and present, at the same time, raise philosophical questions about time, existence and experience itself.

 

A total 18 TV monitors and screens are composed into four parts. While 7 monitors show the audiences captured by the CCTV cameras, 5 monitors deliver both real-time and time-lagged CCTV images. Another 6 monitors present the images of phenomena in society surrounding us (which will be newly filmed of Hongkong Art Basel scenes) at 12 times its original speed.  The other 4 monitors carry the overall images projected onto the entire structure and the rest of the screens.

 

In this installation work, PARK includes inventive images which transform mobile phone numbers into various geometrical shapes that move and change to illuminate our current social circumstance. He seizes on the importance of our mobile phone on which our dependency has become so great that it functions as the essential instrument of consumption and distribution of images and information of the private as well as the public.

  

On the other two walls, PARK will exhibit his most famous images of line and dot.  These paintings created by modifying pixels from a computer are abstracted representations of our surroundings against the backdrop of inundating images and information.

 

PARK’s artistically programmed CCTV monitors that present complex multi-layered images of ourselves existing in different space-time dimensions should fit well into the forward-looking Art Basel art project.  Park’s work encourages us to confront the pressing social phenomena we experience daily in a sociologically, philosophically, and most of all visually arresting manner.