Bongsu Park is a London-based South Korean multidisciplinary artist. Her award-winning repertoire explores human cycles through a collective process between artist and audience.
Read MoreFavouring contemporary dance, music, and editing in her videos and performance works, Park collaborates with choreographers in an attempt to physically manifest the cerebral realm.
Park was born in Busan, South Korea, and recalled growing up with many existential questions surrounding life and death—an attribute that caused her mother to consider whether her daughter should become a monk. Park's unanswerable musings pushed her to pursue art, exploring her queries in connection with other people and the world around her as an alternative to the isolation of self-reflection.
Park initially studied photography and fine art at Sangmyung University in Seoul, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 2003. She then moved to Japan, where she found photography limiting in relation to the time-based works she wanted to make.
Intrigued by the variety of mediums being explored in Europe, the artist enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux in 2007. While living in Grenoble, she met choreographer Yoomi Ahn, who lived in the same apartment building and was also learning French. Park and Ahn became friends and the pair later lived and collaborated together on many of Park's video and installation works.
In 2010, Park moved to London to complete her MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art.
Bongsu Park's practice is deeply invested in the cyclical patterns of human life and unconscious thoughts, expressing the inner world through the movements and interactions of the body, often through the medium of dance.
Bongsu's sculpture, videos, photography, and live performances take place through overarching projects whose themes expand upon one another almost subconsciously, shaped by audience reaction and participation.
Combining Park's first performance works Cord and Cube (both 2011), CORD – CELL – CUBE was staged at Gallery Rosenfeld in 2014, where dancers and live musicians interacted with each other and sculptural elements within the space to 'question the core of relationships.'
Working together with Ahn, Park used 'cord' to symbolise the tension within relationships and also the 'line-age' between mother and baby and family tree.
First staged at The Print Room in London in 2017, Internal Library was an audience participation work that visualised private thoughts as an integral part of the installation. The audience was invited to navigate through a maze-like environment of hanging translucent fabric occasionally illuminated by softly flashing bulbs. Reaching the centre of the labyrinth, viewers found a typewriter at a desk and were invited to write personal thoughts and desires, which were fed through an audiovisual system and projected onto the shifting fabric, displaying a normally solitary practice as a collective 'library'.
'Dream Auction' is the overarching title for a series of artworks begun in 2019 that extends into the field of social sciences. The aim of 'Dream Auction' is to explore the Korean practice of buying and selling dreams, inspired by the Korean narrative Samguk Sagi (The History of the Three Kingdoms) and transmuting it to a contemporary setting where dreams are literally bought and sold.
The dreams Park collected were used in the live performance and video work Dream Ritual, staged at The Coronet Theatre in 2019. She collaborated with dancer Jinyeob Cha and Korean singer-songwriter haihm to tell the story of dream selling through the integration of Cha's flowing movements and the kaleidoscopic projections onto semi-translucent fabric around her, designed to represent the different stages of sleep.
Dream Auction was staged at Gallery Rosenfeld, London and Post Territory Ujeongguk in Seoul in 2021, where participants' dreams, collected by Park during workshops and through website submission, were auctioned off for charity.
In 2015, Park was commissioned by Atelier Chang to create the permanent installation Regeneration for the Imperial Hall, London.
In 2015, Park won the 6th Moha Art Studio residency in Ulsan, South Korea and the Sim Residency in Reykjavik in 2016. In 2018, she was longlisted for the Old Street Iconic Gateway competition for Islington Council. In 2019, Park won the Loop Discover Award, Barcelona.
Bongsu Park has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include in dreams we gather, rosenfeld, London (2022); Dreamers' Gathering, Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul (2021); Dream Ritual, The Coronet Theatre, London (2019); Ritual, The Print Room, London (2019); Internal Library, The Print Room, London (2017).
Group exhibitions include Tamrarok, Bellong Bellong Now Festival in Jeju, The playce camp, Jeju (2020); Contemplating the Spiritual in Contemporary Art, rosenfeld porcini Gallery, London (2019); Flickering and In-Motion, Alternative Art Space IPO, Seoul (2019); Contemporary Venice, The Room Gallery, Venice (2018); Dream Preview, Access Space, Sheffield (2018).
Park's website can be found here and her Instagram can be found here.
Annie Curtis | Ocula | 2022
