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kdpark@ucsd.edu
Biography:
Kyong Park is involved in a wide range of productions on Public Culture,
including research, documentation, and representations focused on the urban
landscapes that delineate the economic, political and cultural borders and
territories of the contemporary social geography. Working in visual arts,
architecture, theory and criticism, Park incorporates text, photography,
video, installation and new media into his work, a practice that is rooted
in research, participation and activism in social, cultural and
environmental spaces. For Park, art is a process for cultural inquiry,
examination and articulation. It is a visual language to supplement text and
other traditional forms of communication, a community rather than a
commodity. His first project was the founding of StoreFront for Art and
Architecture in New York, an internationally respected exhibition space that
he directed from 1982-1998. He then founded International Center for Urban
Ecology in Detroit, producing workshops, urban initiatives and videos, in
collaboration with activists, community organizations and universities
[1998-2001]. They include: "Detroit Making It Better For You," a narrative
video on a fictional conspiracy to destroy the city [2000]; and "24260: The
Fugitive House," a vacant house that 'escaped' Detroit to travel ten cities
in Europe [2001-2008]. Since then, he has traveled and worked in various
cities in Europe, developing a nomadic practice on urban investigation. The
results were: “The Slide," a proposal to build a transparent tube that
people can slide through in an empty high-rise building in Halle Neustadt,
and "BAR/GDR/FRG," a 3-channel video on the three different ideological
cities within Dresden, both projects in Germany [2003]. He was also a
co-curator and artist for Shrinking Cities in Berlin [2002-2004], and the
founding director of Centrala Foundation for Future Cities in Rotterdam in
The Netherlands [2005]. There, he co-produced "Lost Highway Expedition," an
expedition through nine major cities of ex-Yugoslavia and Albania in 25
days, in which several hundred people participated [2006]. His current
project is "New Silk Roads," a series of expeditions between Istanbul and
Tokyo, focusing on the relational conditions of Asian cities within the
geography of globalization, which will be presented in a solo exhibition at
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León in 2009, along with the
publication of a book on this project with Actar in Barcelona [curated and
edited by Octavio Zaya]. Kyong Park was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University
(1996/97), a curator of Kwangju Biennale in Korea (1997), a Visiting Chair
of Urbanism at the University of Detroit Mercy, School of Architecture
(2000-2001), and the editor of “Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond,” a book
on his projects, with contributions from 32 architects, artists and critics
[2005].
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