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       Korean history and tradition suffuse the work of Park Chan-kyong, whose photographs and videos are the subject of the inaugural show in the National Museum of Asian Art’s new galleries dedicated to modern and contemporary art. If the themes undergirding Park’s “Gathering” prove unfamiliar to many of the show’s visitors, some of them are also fairly new to the artist. His work reclaims aspects of Korea surrendered to the Westernization that shaped people like him.

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       Born in Seoul in 1965, Park was raised in a Catholic household with older brother Park Chan-wook, who grew up to become the more famous of the two. (He’s the director of such films as “Oldboy” and “Decision to Leave.”) The younger Park earned an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts before returning to South Korea to become known as much as a critic as an artist.

       The five works in “Gathering,” Park’s first solo show in a major U.S. museum, address relatively recent historic cataclysms. Among these are the division of Korea into north and south, the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in nearby Japan, and the 2014 sinking of a ferry that caused the deaths of 304 people, most of them high school students. But the pieces also invoke the beliefs and ceremonies of Buddhism and the polytheistic Korean folk religion usually described in English as shamanism.

       “I have some tendencies to be religious,” Park acknowledged during the question period after the museum’s Oct. 23 screening of “Night Fishing,” a 2011 short film written and directed by the artist and his older brother.

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       “Gathering” consists of five artworks, two of them videos and the others based on still images. As a photographer, though, Park is pretty much a filmmaker. Two of the non-video pieces include slide shows in which one image melts into another almost as quickly as in a movie.

       The stillest entry is the title piece, which assembles 24 rectangular photos: all details of a traditional temple painting depicting the Buddha’s attainment of nirvana. The pictorial excerpts are hung in irregular fashion along both sides of a narrow, almost hallway-like gallery, one of two such spaces in the show. “Gathering’s” themes of death, serenity and transcendence recur in several pieces, but in the other ones the motifs and characters blend and overlap. Here, the creatures assembled to bid farewell to the Buddha are sequestered from one another inside frames. Although derived from a painting, “Gathering” is the artwork in the show that’s most like a suite of photographs.

       Buddhist mourning rituals are incorporated into the two videos, the 26-minute “Citizen’s Forest” and the 55-minute “Belated Bonsal.” And there are numerous shots of abandoned cemeteries in “Fukushima: Autoradiography,” a montage of stills that mixes Park’s photos with images captured by two Japanese collaborators, photographer Masamichi Kagaya and botanist Satoshi Mori.

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       Kagaya and Mori make photos of radioactive plants, fruits and other artifacts that glow ominously. “Belated Bonsal” is printed like a black-and-white negative, suggesting a world that’s been irradiated into an X-ray version of itself. In both works, contemporary nuclear threats underscore the looming prospect of death.

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       “Bonsal” is the Korean word for a bodhisattva, a person who has achieved enlightenment but forgoes nirvana to stay on Earth and save others. The video re-creates scenes from paintings illustrating the tale of the Buddha’s chief disciple, Mahakasyapa, who was late to his teacher’s cremation.

       The exhibition’s centerpiece is “Citizen’s Forest,” a video whose extreme widescreen format recalls vintage Asian scroll landscapes. It was also designed in homage to Korean artist Oh Yoon’s unfinished 1984 painting of a procession of ghosts — victims of such tragedies of modern Korean history as the Korean War. In Park’s video, the phantoms march through a mountainous wooded area and include skull-headed musicians, men who are naked from the waist down and schoolgirls who drowned in the ferry disaster. The spare score features drums, whistles, a plaintive horn and shamanic chants.

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       Ghosts and Korean shamans are known to keep company. One variety of shaman is said to be able to channel the spirit of a dead person, as depicted in “Night Fishing.” Park’s various artworks seem to fit together, whether smoothly or jaggedly, into a collaged vision of Korean history and identity. To judge from “Gathering,” the artist’s career is also an ongoing montage.

       If you go

       Park Chan-kyong: Gathering

       Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, National Museum of Asian Art, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. asia.si.edu.

       Dates: Through Oct. 13.

       Admission: Free.

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