Draft:Kyong Park

Kyong Park
Kyong Park. Architect, urban theorist, founder/director of StoreFront for Art and Architecture in New York City [1982-98], associate professor of Public Culture in the dept. of Visual Arts at UC San Diego. Photo © Jipil Jung, 2022. (CC BY-SA) Kyong Park
Born	Kyong Park 1955 (age 70–71) Tongyeong, South Korea
Occupations	Architect, artist, urban theorist, activist
Known for	Storefront for Art and Architecture
Website	visarts.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/kyong-park.html

Kyong Park is an experimental architect, artist, urban theorist, cultural activist, and founder, in 1982, of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, an independent, non-profit exhibition space and forum for discussion and debate about art, architecture, and urban theory based in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. “Storefront, especially during its first decade, directly addressed key urban struggles related to displacement, privatization, and public art through its exhibitions, performances, open calls, and public competitions,” notes its website. “These initiatives positioned art and architecture at the center of public life and actively engaged the artistic community in the defense of public space—including space that was identified as inherently public, as well as space that through collective work was to be made public.”

In his artistic practice, cultural activism, and academic research, Park engages with the concepts of public space and social geography, typically in the context of contemporary urban landscapes. “Working in visual arts, architecture, theory, and curatorial practices, [he] incorporates text, photography, video, installation and new media into his works, a practice that is rooted in research, participation, and activism in public spaces,” notes his faculty biography on the University of California, San Diego website, where he is a professor in the Department of Visual Arts. He is especially interested in the conditions that “give rise to shrinking cities (Detroit, for instance) and expanding cities (as in Asia) and to the formation and reconfiguration of border cities (such as San Diego/Tijuana).” According to the architecture critic Martina Dolejsova, "Park has long been a critic of architecture, urban environments, and the role that buildings play in the development of cities. As such, he is drawn to the perplexities of urban battles with issues of blight, economic survival, and growth."

Early Life and Education

Kyong Park was born in 1955 in South Korea, in what was then called Chungmu (and is now known as Tongyeong). According to a biographical sketch in The Making of Meeting: on Arthub Asia’s Collaborative Intelligence, 2007-2012, Park’s family built and operated a movie theater that showed “mostly foreign films, particularly American, French and Italian [movies].” Exposure to international cinema ensured that Park “was ‘globalized’ from early on,” the biography notes. “He felt like the twin brother to the little boy of the 1988 Italian film Cinema Paradiso, watching movies almost every day.” He even dressed like the boy in the movie: “His mother made him Western-style shorts with suspenders.”

In 1967, at the age of 12, Park moved to the United States, where he spent his adolescence in the factory town of Flint, Michigan (later a symbol of corporate exploitation, income inequality, and racist indifference to communities of color as a result of the Michael Moore documentary Roger and Me). He studied architecture at the University of Michigan, where he received a BS in Architecture in 1978, and pursued post-graduate studies in an independent program at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in Manhattan in 1979.

Career

In 1979, Park moved to New York City, where he took up residence in the East Village, at that time a notorious example of urban blight with its fire-gutted buildings, vacant lots, and “stolen, stripped, and burned cars almost on every block.”

In 1982, he founded Storefront for Art and Architecture "in a tiny storefront at 51 Prince Street" (Metropolis magazine) as an experimental gallery and idea laboratory dedicated to the proposition that "art and design have the potential and responsibility," as he wrote at the time, "to affect public policies which influence the quality of life and future of all cities." He served as executive director from Storefront's founding until he left in 1998. The artist Shirin Neshat, to whom Park was married at the time, co-directed the space from 1982 until the mid-'90's. From 1984-86, the urban planner and public-art critic Glenn Weiss was also a co-director. Four years after its founding, Storefront moved to its permanent address at 97 Kenmare Street between Lafayette and Mulberry, near Little Italy.

In 1998, Park moved to Detroit, where he opened the International Center for Urban Ecology (ICUE), "a nomadic practice and research entity" devoted to "urban-based social projects and dialogues focused on the economics, politics, and architecture of the city" (Martina Dolejsova). Park lived in the city, whose urban population had fallen to one million residents by 2000, in a small house with wood cladding in a neighborhood "where surrounding buildings were being abandoned and/or burnt as people departed for the suburbs" (Dolejsova). The center, which Park directed until 2001, hosted workshops and participated in urban initiatives in collaboration with activists, community organizations, and universities. Noteworthy projects included “Detroit: Making It Better For You,” a narrative video about a fictional conspiracy to destroy the city (2000), and “24260: The Fugitive House,” an installation consisting of the house Park lived in, now vacant, dilapidated, deconstructed, and partly reconstructed, which "escaped" Detroit to travel to exhibition spaces in 10 European cities (2001-2008). “I am just one of the thousands of houses that are burnt but still standing, one of the tens of thousands that are empty, and one of the hundreds of thousands that were demolished," recounts the house, in a narrative written by Park that traveled with the exhibit. "I live in a city that hardly resembles a city anymore.”

In succeeding years, Kyong has pursued what The International Curators Forum website calls his "nomadic practice on urban investigation." His ICF biography notes that he was a co-curator of "Shrinking Cities" in Berlin (2002-2004); founding director of Centrala Foundation for Future Cities in Rotterdam (2005); and a co-curator of "Europe Lost and Found," a project on the future geography of Europe; and a prime mover behind "Lost Highway," described as "a mass expedition through nine cities in the Western Balkans." Park calls the Lost Highway Expedition "a massive intelligence swarm that [moved] through nine major cities of ex-Yugoslavia and Albania," part of "Europe Lost and Found"'s larger attempt to "explore the contradictions and synthesis of balkanization and Europeanization" in the context of "temporary society, moving city, and stateless state." Since then, he has created “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 was presented in a solo exhibition at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León in 2009-2010, along with the publication of a monograph on this project with Actar in Barcelona expected in 2011" (ICF). As well, he was the artistic director of the Anyang Public Art Project 2010 in Korea, where he curated 30 projects and commissioned 23 international artists, including Suzanne Lacy, Marjetica Potrč, Rick Lowe, Raumlabor, LOT-EK, Minsuk Cho, and Park Chan-kyong. More recently, he created the exhibition "City in a Village" at Vienna Biennale for Change (2021) and "Nomadic Forums for Future Communities" at the Ob/Scene Festival in South Korea (2022). He was a co-curator of the Korean Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 and for its exhibition “2086: Together How?”

On May 2, 2024, The Kyong Park Prize for Art and Architecture was launched. Honoring what the Storefront announcement calls Park's "groundbreaking legacy," the $25,000 prize is awarded to "a selected individual, collective, or firm working at the intersection of art, architecture, and politics" to provide a financial "safety net as they embark on bold new projects." “The past is great, but the future is more desperate and in need of fearless ideas," said Park. "How can this provide a new outlook or direction for the future?”

Since 2007, Park has been a professor of public culture in the department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego.

Exhibitions

Park has exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León (Spain), the Kunsthalle Graz, the Deichtorhallen (Hamburg), the Kunst-Werke Berlin, and the Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul).

Bibliography

Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond (Hong Kong: Map Book Publishers, 2005), a book on the International Center for Urban Ecology's projects, with contributions from 32 architects, artists and critics, edited by Park. "Urban Ecology contains a collection of projects generated by the International Center for Urban Ecology (iCUE), a nomadic laboratory for future cities," notes the publisher's blurb. "iCUE's projects have taken anti-architectural and non-urban perspectives, using multi-disciplinary processes and integrated collaboration with local communities and activists. Urban Ecology brings together essays on Detroit and many other cities in crisis around the world."

Imagining Eurasia: Visualizing Contemporary History (New York: L Nour Editions, 2019), Kyong Park. "Imagining Eurasia visualizes the historical precedents and contemporary reconstructions of Europe and Asia as one continent, envisioning a new relationship between East and West," notes a page on the Storefront website. "The book highlights the significance of cities, networks, and territories within urban, regional, and continental geopolitics. Through his research, Park questions whether greater trade, migration, and cultural exchange bring about greater empathy and communion between different societies, or ... instead deepen distinctions and result in conflict. The book also uses photographs, videos, graphics, animations, and texts to examine the constitution of points, lines, and areas that have morphologically shaped the space and time of Eurasia."

See also

• Storefront for Art and Architecture