Talking Doors: Park Sungyeon
Park Sungyeon explores universal experiences that cannot be fully explained theoretically such as our everyday, our spaces, and the repetitive nature of ordinary relationships. She expresses the connections between spaces, people, and objects; visible or invisible, through her own storytelling. In these relationships, the subtleties of daily life naturally emerge, and viewers perceive them in various ways based on their own experiences. Park seeks to make us aware of the familiar aspects of life that have become invisible through routine.
Since 2010, she has focused on drawing universal meaning from specific, personal stories encountered in conversations with people she meets. She pays particular attention to her relationships between speaker and listener in both public and private spaces. Her project Regular Cafe with Homemakers involved engaging local communities, poets, composers, and visual artists through dialogue. The work often draws on small, everyday gestures, such as tucking hair behind the ear, resting a chin on the hand, tapping fingers to a piano score, as well as personal narratives about favourite places, private spaces, ways of composing music, and elements from playwrights’ works or individual histories.
Through this process, her works are presented to audiences in diverse forms, including video, sound, installation, drawing, text, and recorded interviews.
Hence, Park’s work reveals a way of perceiving real space as a living entity through fluid modes of thought that resist fixed form. Structured spaces soften and loosen, while the voices of those who speak, and her work themselves, layer personal experience and memory onto physical reality, expanding the terrain of imagination. The outcomes of conversations with others sometimes partially reconstruct real spaces, which are then further transformed by the viewer’s imagination into multiple, overlapping narratives.
In recent years, the resonance and subtle vibrations of everyday life in Park’s practice have taken the form of a kind of spatial humming; echoes of repeated movements and actions within the home. She gives form to this humming by recreating fragments of domestic space. Solid architectural elements such as stair railings, ramps, and door handles are knitted from yarn, becoming soft objects that feel like shed skins, much like the shape of a hand lingering in a mitten once removed. Doors and handles rendered only in silhouette blend imaginary and real spaces in varying ways, generating new narratives at their intersection.
The artist’s solo exhibition at Gallery Chosun presents a selection of works from her ongoing projects, emphasising the idea of space as organic and living. Voices from conversations with a playwright are analyzed and translated into musical notation, while a book compiling conversations among ordinary office workers and mothers reveals the small, everyday realities embedded in their words.
The exhibition views the gallery not as a closed container but as a fluid, living space. As a result, solid walls become open passages with door handles, or even transform into windows. Soft objects made of yarn, seen in her earlier works, are installed alongside short sound pieces, offering viewers a multisensory experience.
A work only fully comes into being through the accumulation of invisible elements; emptiness, sound, humidity, air, and atmosphere. In this sense, the viewer becomes both the protagonist and an essential component of the work itself. As visitors move through the exhibition, sensing and breathing the space, the small details of everyday life begin to form meaningful relationships rather than remaining insignificant.
Park has sought to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary through everyday relationships: who with whom, what with what, and who where. She moves beyond fixed ideas, such as defining a small, narrow room simply by its size, or she analyses lively conversations and voices, translating them into musical scores. In doing so, Park focuses on subjects that remain on the margins rather than taking centre stage, drawing them forward and positioning them as protagonists.
Text by Lee Sang-ho, Gallery Chosun