Park Bona
APT9
Born 1977 Seoul, South Korea
Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea
Park Bona takes her inspiration from the people with whom she collaborates — cooks, carpenters, printers, musicians and actors — to tell simple and engaging stories that avoid grand narratives but often touch on broader social themes. Park places her collaborators in unusual and occasionally awkward game-like situations, and the appeal of her work lies in their responses, as well as the complex social and historical contexts that these juxtapositions bring into play. Underlying these projects is a sophisticated reflection on how artists engage with their audience. Labour, and its relationship to capitalism, redundancy and repetition, are recent preoccupations of her works, which are injected with the humour and pathos of the everyday.
Park Bona / South Korea b.1977 / Beyond the Sea (still) 2018 / Three-channel HD video: 16:58 minutes, colour, sound / Commissioned for APT9 / Supported by Arts Council Korea / © and courtesy: Park Bona
Beyond the sea 2018 continues Bona Park’s exploration of themes of extinction and redundancy brought about by human activity, technological development and economic imperatives. Its three channels each focus on an individual working behind the scenes in Korea’s film and television industry — a voice actor, a lighting operator and a stunt performer — whose roles have become precarious with shifts in cinematic fashion and financing.
The work’s central monologue, read by the voice actor, is drawn from French playwright Marguerite Duras’s experimental 1981 film The Atlantic Man — an ode to a departed lover. The ‘you’ addressed by the central monologue is directed toward film and television workers, and the profession of voice acting in particular. Once popular for dubbing foreign films, many voice actors were made redundant after the global financial crisis of 2008, their function replaced by subtitling.
Abstracted from their workaday context and framed by Bona Park’s videography, the actions of all three professionals take on a poetic resonance. Deeper readings are also possible — both of the oblique cinematic references inherent in each action, and of the broader conditions of labour in jobs that are vulnerable to obsolescence, the workforce equivalents of endangered species in the natural world.
