This work was presented in Park Jung Hyuk’s first solo exhibition, 《Malocclusion》, held at Artspace HUE in 2003.

“In the very heart of civilization, we were sneering as we watched the fight of beasts.”
 
Presented in 2003, Festival is a single-channel video work that sketches the grotesque undercurrent of a bullfighting festival held in Bucheon in 2002. Surrounded by high-rise apartment complexes, a sports field becomes the unlikely stage for combat. At the center of this dissonant landscape, the artist directs his attention to the unsettling discord that permeates the scene.
 
Two bulls are driven onto a stage governed by rules designed by humans. Their forced confrontation is magnified and broadcast on a large screen in close-up. Yet the artist’s lens ultimately turns away from the bulls’ horns and toward the expressions of the spectators—those who observe and smirk at the spectacle unfolding before them. When the suffering of the other is converted into a “visual attraction” through the screen, the festival is transformed into a chilling site of cruelty.
 
In this landscape, where the comfort of contemporary civilization (apartment complexes) coexists with primal brutality (bullfighting), the work poses a question that remains urgent more than two decades later: Who, precisely, is the sacrifice behind the ‘festival’ you are enjoying?