This programme features two moving image works by Korean artist Park Chan-kyong. They reflect upon the 2011 nuclear incident in Fukushima, Japan and question how radioactive contamination can be faced from a material and spiritual perspective.

Fukushima, Autoradiography

Park Chan-kyong | 2019 | Japanese, with English subtitles | 24 min. 40 sec.

Fukushima, Autoradiography juxtaposes two sets of photographic images: Park Chan-kyong’s taken in Fukushima in 2019 and Japanese photographer Kagaya Masamichi and botanist Mori Satoshi’s autoradiographs of diverse organisms and objects. The scientific black-and-white images contrast with Park’s colour photographs taken on a spring day in a small suburban town. Both sets attempt to unravel the truth of the radioactive accident but fail to comprehensively depict the post-disaster situation due to the ghostly non-presentness of the autoradiographs and invisibleness of the radioactivity. Nonetheless, the combination of these contrasting depictions offers a glimpse into a post-catastrophic reality and conceptually addresses the deadlock between images and textual information.

Belated Bosal

Park Chan-kyong | 2019 | English | 55 min.

Belated Bosal combines Buddhist narratives of the Buddha's death with the contemporary reality of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It follows two women climbing a spectral mountain, one searching for a shipping container and the other measuring radiation with a Geiger counter. They meet towards the end of the film, together with other scattered characters, to perform a funeral rite in a shipping container which has been transformed into a temporary Buddhist temple.

The mysterious gathering of these alienated characters in a contaminated landscape evokes an unsettling, otherworldly atmosphere. It describes individuals’ dealing with ecological disruption and the persistence of cultural traditions and collective spiritual practice in the face of an uncertain future. The film’s radical use of symbolic imagery and detailed negative black-and-white imagery, resembling X-ray or plutonium-sensitive film, further enhances this tension and alters our conventional perception of the natural world.

Park Chan-kyong (b. 1965, South Korea) is an artist, film director, and art critic whose work explores Korea’s rapid modernisation and its cultural complexities. A protagonist reviving ‘minjung art’, Park’s work addresses the effects of Cold War politics and employs spirituality to interrogate the impact of Westernisation on Korean society. He blends ancient shanshui landscape painting techniques with contemporary film as a panoramic structure to bridge past and present. Several of his moving image installations are part of the M+ Collections.