“One night at the age of thirteen, beneath the moonlight seeping through the cracks of a rooftop window, I encountered an unfamiliar fear. The overwhelming presence that seemed to press down upon me was none other than the ‘shadow of my own toes.’”
 
This episode encapsulates the “dual aura” that underlies the artist’s practice at the time. Within a single object, its material presence inevitably coexists with a counterbalancing energy that stands at its very opposite. Just as a stronger light produces a more grotesque shadow, the essence of being is completed only when opposing concepts are integrated.
 
The ‘Image( )-Image( )’ series projects images that are dismantled and distorted in all directions through the mediation of a mirror. The unnaturally elongated movement of hair within the frame stimulates archetypal fears dormant in the depths of the viewer’s psyche. At the very moment when the familiar image of the “self” transforms into an unfamiliar “monster,” we are compelled to confront the concealed truths of our inner being.
 
Image( )–Image( )5, 2000, Variable installation using one mirror and one projector
— A Portrait of the Abyss Cascading Vertically
“A waterfall of images pouring from the highest point into the lowest unconscious.”
 
In 2000, Park Jung Hyuk’s Image( )–Image( )5 delivered a powerful visual shock at the《Factory Art Festival – Blind Love (l’amour aveugle)》, held within the raw industrial site of the Sempio HQ, and at the《Daejeon International Media Art Exhibition》at the Daejeon Museum of Art.
 
Composed with radical minimalism—only a single mirror and a single projector—the work overwhelms the entire spatial field. The figure’s violent act of shaking long, water-soaked hair is reborn, through the mirror’s reflection, as an enormous and grotesque distortion whose form can no longer be clearly discerned.
 
By actively engaging the overwhelming vertical height of the installation site, the elongated afterimage cascading downward from above induces in the viewer a simultaneous sense of awe before a monumental presence and a primordial fear. The rough analog experiment produced twenty-six years ago—shaped by physical distance and the contingent angle of a mirror—generates a visceral tremor that today’s refined technologies can never fully replicate.