BOOK:Park Chan-Kyong-Red Asia Complex,MMCA Publications

Park Chan-Kyong is the second artist selected for the “MMCA* Artist Studies” series. Since the late 1980s, Park has been a member of a community of critics writing art and organizing exhibitions through forums such as the Research Society for Art Criticism (misul bipyeong yeonguhoe), Forum A, BOL. Park took his first steps as an artist with the solo exhibition “Black Box: The Memory of Cold War Images”, held at the Kumho Museum in 1997, and has since continued to produce film and video works critically examining the Cold War, Korean modernity, and colonialism. Under the title Red Asia Complex, this book examines, from various perspectives, the nearly thirty-years trajectory of Park Chan-Kyong’s art and writing. The title of the book, “Red Asia Complex” is a concept that has been rooted in Park’s art and writing for a long time. If the “Red complex” is the driver of the mental geography that Park has explored in reference to Korea’s Cold War division culture, then the “Asia complex” suggests the postcolonial perspective through which Park has ceaselessly critiqued the concrete institutions of tradition, modernity, and art in Korea. It is our hope that this book, created with much devotion and help from many people, will be joined by others in contributing to further research into the Park Chan-kyong archive, and at the same time that it will serve as a reference for the critical ref lection and interpretation of Korean social history and art history.-Dimitris Lempesis

* National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul