[Work Introduction]
Presented in 2001, Reverse is a video work that runs parallel to the installation series Love me tender. Through the process in which numbers densely inscribed on a hand are washed away by water and then returned once more to clarity, the work contemplates the “eternal cycle” in which extinction and generation continuously repeat.
 
[Operational Principle and Intention: The Mechanism of Recording Time and Purification]
The Meaning of the Numbers: The numbers densely written on the hand of the figure on screen represent the “dates of endurance”—the days during which the artist collected his own fingernails and toenails for approximately four years, beginning during his military service, in preparation for the production of the Love me tender 1–4 series.
 
While society imposes unilateral commemorative days, the artist metaphorically reflects our habituation to social conventions by arbitrarily designating and memorializing his own commemorative day—the day of trimming fingernails and toenails.

Paradoxical Purification: The visual sensibility of “reverse playback,” in which water once contaminated with black ink becomes transparent again, symbolizes the perpetual cycle of life and the reversibility of time—like fingernails and toenails that grow back no matter how often they are cut.
 
Deconstruction of Symbolism: The act of washing away the painfully accumulated record of time (the numbers) suggests that even the authoritative symbol of the “heart (love)” presented in the earlier installation may ultimately be an illusion destined to be erased. It signals a liberation from attachment.

[Critical Perspective: The Director’s View]
Park Jung Hyuk’s Reverse is a bold performance that elevates the most personal bodily by-products (fingernails and toenails) and the time of their accumulation (dates) into the public sphere of art, only to return them once again to a state of nothingness.
 
If the 'Love me tender' series critiqued the fictitious authority of “love” by supporting a heart made of fingernails and toenails upon an artificially fabricated base, this video translates all such artificial effort into a process of purification, offering viewers a sublime catharsis.
 
The duration of 3 minutes and 37 seconds is not merely the running time of the video, but the condensation of the hundreds of days the artist endured.
 
Artist’s Note
“The dates that filled my palm are records of endurance, through which I gathered what had been discarded and shaped it into an illusion named ‘love.’ Like fingernails that grow back no matter how often they are cut, the traces of desire and pain we inscribe are endlessly washed away and reborn within the flow of time. Through this clearing water, I seek to reveal the cycle of existence.”