Park Jaeyoung

Trained in sculpture at Seoul National University (BFA and MFA), Park Jaeyoung lives and works in Seoul, Korea, and is IARI’s first international creative specialist. Park devises laboratory environments that test pseudo-scientific ideas in everyday life, playing with calculable scientific evidence and people’s blind belief in science through fictional narratives, fake machines, and artificial specimens. For the Spencer Museum’s exhibition Temporal Turn: Art & Speculation in Contemporary Asia, Park staged the Kansas Bokaisen Project, a localized iteration of his ongoing artwork about an imagined, mutant creature called bokaisen. Although Park’s installation recalls different historical periods from Korea, for the exhibition he used site-specific strategies to move this narrative into different temporal and spatial contexts. To create a local incarnation of the work, Park worked with a KU student to fabricate a laboratory environment within the Museum from everyday materials. He then further infused the bokaisen’s narrative with elements of Kansas history by designing biological features based on indigenous wildlife, such as the ubiquitous cottontail rabbit and the mythical jackalope. Park further circulated the story of the bokaisen through social media, discussions with art and art history classes, and public presentations. Park’s installation presses the boundaries between fiction and reality by realizing a site-specific manifestation of the bokaisen and further disseminating the creature’s myth through various narrative strategies. His artistic approach centers on an interplay of scientific and artistic research, and his installation for Temporal Turn focuses on questions of research, taking the form of a scientific laboratory.