Park Jungkeun presenting his work at the Residency Open Day
South Korean visual artist Park Jungkeun has recently completed his residency program at Leo Gallery. During the residency, the artist engaged in in-depth exchanges with the local art community, employing his distinctive photographic and video language to initiate new reflections on space, memory, and fluidity.
Park Jungkeun continues his creative practice rooted in the experiences of migration and movement. He explores the entangled relationships between humans and non-humans, places and events. Based primarily in Jeju, his work engages with modern and contemporary historical events, ocean currents and drift, as well as ecological transformations. Rather than representing specific events as fixed histories, his practice focuses on experiences that are continuously reconstructed within flows across time and space. Photography and video function as media that record processes of movement and relation, forming a site where personal narratives, collective memory, and the layers of objects and environments intersect. His work reveals invisible connections and tensions, proposing new ways of perceiving place and existence.
On May 27, 2026, during the Leo Gallery Residency Open Day, the artist shared the creative concept behind his representative work *Sea of Crossed Paths*. This work originates from the life experience of an elderly man the artist met in Bukchon, Jeju. Following the Jeju April 3 Incident, the man crossed the sea repeatedly between Jeju, Busan, and Osaka in search of livelihood. Tracing these routes of movement, the artist explores how different temporalities coexist in disjunction within the same space. Here, the sea is not merely a backdrop but a medium where drift and migration, disconnection and connection occur simultaneously. Through the imagery of the sea, Park Jungkeun reveals life trajectories that intersect yet never fully overlap, visualizing the process by which experiences and memories are continuously reconfigured within flows.
