Hyun Gi Park
Bio
Hyun Gi Park is a Korean American artist born in Bryan, TX, and raised in North Carolina. Park obtained her BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. Hyun Gi’s works recreate the essence of traditional rituals into fictionalized ceremonies with new age health trends and consecrating them. Her practice involves incense, historically used to measure time, as markers to reimagine new time structures for certain gestures. Her recent installation and digital works evolve from performances, attempting to replicate the visceral, and immortalizing it. She has been awarded recent national and international residencies including Eyebeam Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future (Brooklyn, NY), Penland School of Craft (Penland, North Carolina), MACAO (Milan, Italy), and Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, Vermont). Her performances and installations have been featured in numerous exhibitions at venues in New York, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and she has performed in the Pittsburgh Performance Art Festival, LabBodies Performance Art Review in Baltimore, and the Art Licks Weekend in London. Park lives and works in Los Angeles, CA as an incense maker, bookbinder, tattooer, designer, and runs BABOSHOP, a multi use space and studio.
Rapid Response Project
In 1998, the Korean company LG created a 10-year-old non-binary cyber shaman named “Cysha”. Cysha was aimed to protect computers from viruses and pornography. During Phase 1, Hyun G plans to conjure Cysha into an interactive portal on the internet, accessible to anyone. This portal is envisioned as a sacred space that is constantly refreshed, a loop, and an inherent ritual.
It will include different apps, generators, videos, images, and texts mirroring aspects of the artist’s work and Korea’s politics with shamanism, but within a digital sphere, immortalized. The portal will use the digital sphere to create discourse on the oppression of primitive religions through colonialism and the results of adapting to modernization via westernization.