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

Red sculpture suspended in air. Organic shape (like backwards S) and trashy look. Many many holes hand pierced in the red semi transparent sheet. Red shadow in background.
Caught Up, 2022 
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
Detail image of previous sculpture, the slime/sand/salt/red pepper layer is partially coming off of the red plastic
Photo credit: Aaron Wojack
Photo credit: Aaron Wojack
4 tablets made of rice paper with text on them, sitting on white shelf on white wall. A soft blue fleece goes from the shelf to the floor petering out into other materials (wool, wire...)
Dreams of the Room (Epitaph Tablets), 2022
rice paper, chalk pastel, sand, rice, fleece, wool, sheepskin, wire, toasted gochugaru. 2022 

Photo credit: Aaron Wojack


Sun Park / ABOUT
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