Sun Park / ABOUT
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Caught Up & Dreams of the Room (Epitaph Tablets)
Installed in Sowing Worlds at San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery
December 09, 2022 to Feb 11, 2023
Sun Park’s practice considers what she calls “entangled bodies,” or the sometimes-messy connections between humans, animals, bodies of water, divine bodies, and place. Her work often explores the idea of porousness and how we as beings absorb and mesh with what is around us. For Park, this porosity allows her to contemplate her personal histories and connections to Korean shamanism and Christianity, opening up different possibilities and transformation.
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In Caught Up, salt, sand, and gochugaru (a type of Korean chili flake and is considered one of the most important ingredients in Korean cooking) are mixed in with slime and rubbed over pierced and degraded plastic. Park suspends the sculpture as if twisting and undulating with the intention that unwanted spirits would be compelled to linger within it, warding them away from the rest of the space. Nearby, Dreams of the Room (Epitaph Tablets) is based on myoji, epitaph tables used in the Josean dynasty (1392-1897) to commemorate a life. Rather than the traditional stone or ceramic, Park’s epitaphs are made of rice paper which, along with the plastic in Caught Up, she likens to skin that both holds and releases.
Curated by Jackie Im, Sun Mi Lee, Ji Yoon Yang
Press Release
Pierced red plastic film, unprocessed slime, sand, toasted gochugaru and sea salt to keep away troubled spirits, wire, electrical cable, yarn, trimmer line, brads, ribbon, strings.
Photo credit: Aaron Wojack
rice paper, chalk pastel, sand, rice, fleece, wool, sheepskin, wire, toasted gochugaru. 2022
Photo credit: Aaron Wojack
