Dasom Park (b. 1989) has developed her practice by closely interweaving painterly methodology with an interest in the “body” as material—something subject to inevitable transformation. Her work undergoes a process of examining how the body, understood as a material concept, operates in reality, while also reflecting on the notion of loss embedded within it.

In her early works, Dasom Park created scenes that resemble fragments from a dream. Within these compositions, the bodies of humans, objects, and even insects are exchanged with one another, and through repeated acts of substitution, they lose their original specificity—eventually dissolving into a single incline or curve.

Through this dreamlike methodology, Dasom Park sought to confront universal fears about life. She regarded human death—particularly the inevitable aging of the elders she loved—with a mixture of tenderness and anxiety.
 
According to her artist’s note, Park explains that she “invokes the methodology of dreams in order not to let each moment of transformation, which arrives incessantly and faithfully, become a loss—to avoid being engulfed by loss.” For her, the space-time of dreams is a realm where transformation and distortion may occur without necessarily carrying the conventional sorrow of loss.
 
Thus, within this liberated dreamscape, she imagines the joyful collapse of what she once believed in, thereby facing the anxiety and fear brought about by the inescapable conditions of reality.

Park understood the reason one can remain unperturbed by the transformations that occur in dreams as stemming from the fact that “we have forgotten that we were ourselves, that the thing was once itself.” On this premise of forgetting, she began to translate the methodology of dreams into painting.
 
In her 2017 works, she depicted the landscapes of forgotten cities; from 2018 onward, she painted faces absorbed in moments of intoxication so deep that they seemed to forget space and time—and even themselves. The bodies of these figures often appear as though they have lost awareness of their own position and texture.
 
From 2019, she began more actively to explore scenes in which bodies undergo transformation. Posing the question, “How can I dismantle the bodies I paint in a way that is more natural, softer, and more tender?” she sought to strip away, one by one, the conditions that conventionally define what it means to “live as a human being.”

For instance, the artist imagined houses that stand above ground being relocated beneath it, or bodies confined within enclosed spaces and closed communities. She envisioned these bodies exchanged with those of animals, insects, or even objects, and pictured scenes in which bodies that had endured repeated acts of dismantling gradually transformed into forms that lean, rest upon, or depend on something else.
 
Bodies that can no longer sustain themselves do not simply approach extinction within her paintings. Just as any transformation can unfold freely and without fear in a dream, the bodies she depicts endlessly deconstruct, mutate, and expand within the world of painting—harboring at once the possibilities of dissolution and generation.

Dasom Park’s first solo exhibition, 《House of A Hunched Back》, held at Place MAK2 in 2021, unfolded the transformations of the aging body—particularly the “incline” of the elderly’s bent posture—through her dream methodology. Within her canvases, all people and objects assume slanted forms. This peculiar spectacle, in which every subject equally adopts a tilted state, resembles a scene from a dream.
 
By constructing a new world composed entirely of inclinations, the negative connotations embedded in the hunched body of the elderly are effaced. The act of translating all entities into inclines returns the world to a condition of nonlinearity and chaos, functioning almost like a spell that dissolves hierarchy.

In her 2022 solo exhibition 《The Art of Matter》, held at the Kumho Museum of Art, Dasom Park sought to interweave her reflections on the body even more closely with painterly methodology.
 
Within irregularly deformed frames and nonstandard supports, melting inclines and curves, clusters of varying sizes and shapes, and bodily images are organically interconnected through subtle chromatic relationships.
 
In these dreamlike and unfamiliar spaces, viewers encounter bodies that have become infinitely liberated from conventional constraints of time and space. Through this experience, the exhibition offers an opportunity to reconsider and reflect upon the body from perspectives beyond those we typically assume.

Meanwhile, in her 2023 solo exhibition 《Drive》, held at Gallery2, Dasom Park superimposed the roller coaster track—engineered to repeat vertical motion through gravity—with the aged, wrinkled body shaped by the passage of time.
 
Her longstanding inquiry into the body is transposed onto the sweeping curves of the roller coaster in two paintings, Smoking (2022) and Bad Photo (2022). Having often associated the sight of an ailing body with sorrow or melancholy, she began to search for the fundamental source of those emotions, ultimately arriving at the clear and inescapable causes of time and gravity.

Matters unrelated to the essence of emotion lie beyond human control, and the body transforms into a neutral material that simply registers wrinkles. As Park gradually came to observe the aging body with an increasingly detached gaze, the curves she encountered in the roller coaster became a device for rendering the sensation of the wrinkled body as undulating form.
 
Rather than foregrounding the emotions evoked by the body, she prioritizes drawing its form—using curvature as a means to understand wrinkles as they are, in and of themselves.

Dasom Park’s paintings begin with the act of tearing paper and conclude with the drawing of cracks. This approach momentarily sets aside the a priori rules of painting in order to move closer to results that emerge naturally and candidly under the touch of the human hand.
 
Tracing the path through which the image comes into being, one encounters paper torn along its grain, forms conceived in the mind or shaped by surrounding conditions, and surfaces fissured by drawn cracks. Whether following the direction of the paper’s fibers, the way a form unfolds, or the movement of the eye across the surface, the painting retains traces of gazes guided not solely by the artist’s will, but by the inclinations of the very elements that constitute the work.

Over the past several years, Dasom Park has focused on the materiality of paper. As she came to recognize its limitations, she recently began incorporating the pliable properties of fabric into her painting practice. Rather than working on a gessoed “white” canvas as a neutral ground, she sought to explore images that grow in accordance with the inherent material qualities of the cloth itself.

For example, in the 2024 painting Romantic Animal, the materiality of the fabric and the image appear as one while the cloth remains attached to the wall. Park closely observed the wrinkles formed around the few points where tape fixed the fabric in place, as well as the shadows created by those folds, incorporating them as integral pictorial elements. As she painted in accordance with the creased contours of the cloth, the fabric and the image drew ever closer together, and the painting gradually grew into the semblance of a living organism.
 
Because the work reveals without concealment the process of its own making and its internal structure—becoming an image in and of itself—Park considered it “romantic,” and thus titled it Romantic Animal. Building upon this painterly inquiry grounded in the materiality of fabric, she has continued to expand her contemplation of the “body of painting.”

Extending her inquiry into the physicality of painting, the solo exhibition 《Hanging Paintings》 (A-Lounge Contemporary, 2025) layers and peels back the skin—positioning the surface of the canvas as a site of sensory solidarity and as a point of contact between bodies.
 
In place of a rigidly fixed frame, the corners of the canvas are pulled taut with steel wires, generating tension across a sensitive surface. Upon this structure, the boundary between body and painting loosens. Her works respond to environmental forces such as gravity, friction, and temperature. The curling of fabric, the detachment of tape, and even the sagging caused by weight become events that belong simultaneously to the painting and to the body, interwoven as one.

Like the human body that inevitably undergoes transformation, her paintings become vulnerable bodies placed before unpredictable environmental change. For the artist, the canvas is akin to clothing, bedding, or flooring—a sheet-like material that can be folded, crumpled, or cut—an emergent form of life that yields to the conditions of its own material existence.

By adopting the very process through which matter responds and comes alive as her methodology, Dasom Park’s paintings move beyond serving as mere vessels for images; they become tactile devices akin to skin, transmitting sensation through contact. In identifying the human body with the body of painting, she forges a tender solidarity through—and alongside—material itself.
 
Her works thus no longer remain static entities fixed to the wall, but are encountered as flexible bodies and living matter.

 “I imagine, within this liberated space where no transformation or distortion exacts a penalty, the joyful collapse of what I once believed in.”    (Dasom Park, Artist’s Note) 

Dasom Park earned her BFA in Painting from Ewha Womans University and her MFA there as well. Her solo exhibitions include 《Hanging Paintings》 (A-Lounge Contemporary, Seoul, 2025), 《Four Sheets》 (Vohm Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《Romantic Maxima》 (Place MAK2, Seoul, 2024), 《Flat Fire》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2023), and 《Drive》 (Gallery2, Seoul, 2023).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Shifting Scenes》 (APOproject, Seoul, 2025), 《And Afterwards》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《The Original Face》 (Laheen Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《THREE HOLES》 (EVERYART Gallery, Seoul, 2023), 《Random Pages》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2022), 《Where All Places Are》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021), among others.
 
Park was a resident artist at the Kumho Art Studio (15th term) from 2019 to 2021, and was selected as a Kumho Young Artist in 2022.

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