PARK JONG-KYU

The artist’s own formulation is direct. “Noise,” he has written, “refers to the remnant of humanism.” In a world of computation that tends towards perfection, error is the trace of something still human in the system — the point at which the machine has not yet fully closed. Park’s work is, in this sense, less a celebration of the digital than a sustained argument about what survives inside it. He has described the present as an era in which “humans became robots,” and his practice as an attempt to locate, within that condition, “the hope we still have left.”

Method: creation through removal

Park’s paintings begin as data. He prints dots and lines at pixel scale onto sheet paper laid over canvas, then removes or retains them according to specific coordinates. The removed areas are filled with paint; the painted areas are left intact; the paper is peeled away; and the cycle is repeated, layer upon layer. He calls this process “creation through removal” — the image emerges from what is taken out, not from what is added. The method carries its concept: a painting that is made by subtraction, from a signal that was itself a kind of absence.

The results are systematic without being mechanical. Up close, the surfaces reveal the hand that cut, painted and peeled; at a distance, they resolve into fields of dots and lines that recall a screen seen too closely, or a signal breaking up. Park has extended the same logic into three dimensions — the Noosphere sculptures (2022–23), carved wooden blocks whose stepped, grid-like cuts read as pixel structures made solid — and into video, where the same noise is set in motion.

Series

Vertical Time, the series that has occupied Park most intensively since 2021, takes its title from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard distinguished horizontal time — the linear, everyday sequence of moments — from vertical time, the layered, stacked time of poetic and artistic experience, in which past, present and future coexist. Park’s Vertical Time paintings embody this through structure rather than image. Their accumulated layers of noise stack time into a single surface, so that the eye, moving across them, perceives different strata at once. Many works in the series are built on shaped or angled canvases — “variable canvas” in the artist’s terminology — whose tilted planes push the picture off the wall and into the viewer’s space, so that the stacking of time becomes physical. “This very moment,” Park has written of the series, “holds both traces of the past and possibilities for the future.”

~Kreuzen (from 2019) treats noise as a system of crossings: dots and lines distributed across the canvas by coordinate, with larger coloured points marking nodes in the field. The series has moved between painting and video, and in 2026 its video form was shown on the 112-metre LED facade of Kö-Bogen II in central Düsseldorf. Embodiment (2017–18), shown at Art Basel Hong Kong and The Armory Show, extended the method into installation, including the mixed-media floor work shown at Indang Art Museum in 2017.

Recent exhibitions

Park’s work has been presented at a scale that few Korean artists of his generation have achieved abroad. In 2025 the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou dedicated the entire second floor of its BAIETEN building — some 1,320 square metres — to his solo exhibition Spectres of the Bitstream, curated by museum director Wang Shaoqiang. It was the first time in the museum’s history that a full floor had been given to a living foreign artist. Around sixty works were shown, spanning painting, installation and media; the exhibition’s framing, in the curator’s words, connected “the rhythm of life with the vibrations of data.”

Later the same year Park was invited as Korea’s representative artist to Forever Is Now 05, the international contemporary art exhibition held at the Pyramids of Giza. His installation Code of the Eternal — a fifteen-metre triangular structure of acrylic, steel and metal mesh, built on the proportions of the pyramid itself, set above a field of acrylic mirror dots arranged in Morse code — carried a message, written by the artist, from Dangun, the founder of ancient Korea, to the Pharaoh. The text was engraved on a wooden stele beside the work.

In April 2026 Art Düsseldorf named Korea its first Guest of Honour, and presented Park’s solo exhibition The Art of Noise, curated by Gregor Jansen, former director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, under the project title Korean Practice – J.Park. The exhibition brought together paintings, sculptures and video installations in a single continuous presentation. At its entrance two video works faced one another: on one side, the sound waves of chang, traditional Korean vocal music, expanded into visual form; on the other, the image receiving that signal transformed into noise. Jansen described Park’s work as “a sensory translation of the reality of the digital age, connecting the invisible flow of data with human experience.”

Earlier presentations include Maze of Onlookers at Art Basel Hong Kong (Insights, 2017), an installation of twenty-one monitors built on CCTV footage that addressed the entanglement of watching and being watched; a solo presentation in The Armory Show’s Focus section (2018); and solo exhibitions at Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong (2017), Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul (2023), Gana Art, Seoul (2021), Daegu Art Museum (2019) and Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art (2018). His 2023 exhibition at Hakgojae, Phantom of Time and Time of Phantom, introduced the concept of the “phantom” — not a ghost, in Park’s account, but a life lived vaguely and in conformity, unaware of the forces driving the era — against which he proposed neither optimism nor pessimism but a “Golden Mean” between the two.

Education and collections

Park studied at Keimyung University, Daegu, and at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he completed the post-diplôme programme in painting and mixed media.

His work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art; Daegu Art Museum; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; Gwangju Museum of Art; Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art; Sian Art Museum; Indang Museum; Walkerhill Art Museum; and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

He received the Ha Jung-woong Young Artist Award (2004), the Ha In-doo Art Prize (2024), the Geumbok Culture Award (2025) and the inaugural Daegu Mecenat Artist Award (2026).

__

Courtesy Seoul Art Now