Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Park has held solo exhibitions including 《Teal Greenhouse》 (WWNN, Seoul, 2024), 《Vortex 8》 (A-Lounge Contemporary, Seoul, 2023), 《Angel Tail》 (Everyart, Seoul, 2022), and 《Melting a Lump Sugar》 (Artspace Boan 2, Seoul, 2020).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Park has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Rabbit Hole》 (KICHE, Seoul, 2025), 《FACE》 (Mimesis Art Museum, Paju, 2024), 《Dubious Gaze》 (WWNN, Seoul, 2023), 《Lagrange Point》 (DrawingRoom, Seoul, 2022), and 《Every Where & Here》 (The Page Gallery, Seoul, 2020).

Awards (Selected)

Park was also selected for the 38th Joong-Ang Art Award and the 2015 OCI OCI YOUNG CREATIVES.

Residencies (Selected)

Park has undertaken artist residencies at the Artst’s Space DAL (2021) and the MMCA Residency Goyang (2018).

Originality & Identity

Park Seok Min’s work begins by questioning the basic conditions that constitute the world, such as time, space, gaze, and sensation, through the medium of painting. The artist is drawn to moments when an object appears different from its original form, diverges from past experience, or cannot be explained through precise language.

Rather than dismissing such states as simple illusion or emotional fluctuation, he collects related sensory clues from everyday objects, urban scenes, science fiction novels, documentaries, landscapes encountered during walks, and conversations with fellow artists. For Park, painting is not a flat surface that represents an already given subject, but closer to a device through which sensations, misreadings, and emotional disturbances that cannot be fully explained in language acquire structures of time and space.
 
The ‘Temporary Orbit’(2013-early 2020s) series marks the period in which this inquiry began to take shape in earnest. “Temporary” refers to provisional, mutable, and fleeting states, while “orbit” suggests repetition, trace, and paths of movement. In 《New satellite-Temporary Orbit》(OCI Museum of Art, Seoul, 2016), the artist recomposed visual fragments and everyday routes collected through his exploration of urban spaces, transforming familiar reality into something like an unknown outer-space environment.

In works such as Temporary Orbit(2016), Phantom Pain(2016), Co-orbit(2016), Event field(2016), and Back room(2016), architecture, theater, rooms, figures, and light do not converge into one stable scene, but disperse across different directions and viewpoints.

Here, the picture plane becomes a place that maintains the order of real space while simultaneously undoing it, questioning the boundaries between truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, inside and outside. The reflected and refracted light that appears in Quiet Play and Vagabond(2015) also leads to questions about what we see and believe within social and political situations.
 
After 2018, Park’s attention shifted toward doubt and curiosity about the spatiotemporal condition of the “present” itself. He composed paintings that store the subject as though it were image data divided into temporal frames, or as if a single object had been photographed from multiple angles within the same moment, exploring how incomplete stimuli can be perceived as a total form. 《Melting a Lump Sugar》(Artspace Boan 2, Seoul, 2020) is an exhibition that shows this transition.

Through the impossible thought experiment of a sugar cube dissolving in air, the artist considers the essence of an object not as a fixed form, but as a potential for transformation. Sugar, sweetness, lightness, void, lighting, and circulation become elements that make the entire exhibition into a sensory orbit, rather than remaining subjects of individual paintings. From this period onward, Park’s work expands beyond a single complete image into a system in which surface and space, gaze and body, material and atmosphere operate together.
 
In recent work, Park brings together speculative narrative, near-futuristic imagination, movement and ecosystem, immaterial modes of image production, and material experiments in painting. In 《Angel Tail》(Everyart, Seoul, 2022) and the ‘Mining Depth’(2022-2023) series, waves of light, empty corners, and canvases of different sizes induce the viewer’s bodily movement, extending the question of looking beyond the picture plane.

His solo exhibition 《Vortex 8》(A-Lounge Contemporary, Seoul, 2023) translated movement itself into painting through the movement of the solar system, the vortex, and counterpoint, while 《Teal Greenhouse》(WWNN, Seoul, 2024) borrowed the structure of closed-loop ecosystems found in post-apocalyptic science fiction to imagine the exhibition space as a fictional greenhouse where paintings are transplanted and cultivated.

In works such as Teal Greenhouse 01(2024), Teal Greenhouse 02(2024), Terrarium 01(2024), and Temple Dawn 02(2024), forms whose identities remain uncertain—whether traces of ruin or signs of life—ask about the uncertainty of the future and the vitality of painting at the same time.

In later works presented in the group exhibition 《Rabbit Hole》(KICHE, Seoul, 2025), including Temple Dawn 06(2025), Temple Incognita 01(2025), and Terra Incognita 01(2025), geographical features such as burnt trees, stone towers, and pools of water appear as objects connecting the physical and transcendental realms, and the relationship between form and energy emerges as a new axis of inquiry.

Style & Contents

Park’s practice is centered on painting, yet his painting does not remain fixed within the flat surface. In the early ‘Temporary Orbit’ series, he used oil on canvas to arrange urban fragments, theaters, rooms, staircases, structures, figures, and light in complex ways. In works such as Co-orbit, Event field, and Back room, urban objects and architectural elements are dismantled like boxes that have been cut open and unfolded, blurring the distinctions between interior and exterior, up and down, front and back.

The picture planes from this period are close to surreal spaces constructed from multiple viewpoints. Individual works exist independently, but they also form organic relationships within the exhibition space, creating a spatial experience that is continually reassembled according to the viewer’s movement and gaze.
 
After 《Melting a Lump Sugar》, Park began to address more actively the relationship between the surface of painting and the exhibition space. He imagines painting as something like “an unfamiliar light placed in space,” asking whether the void is an ideal position or a physical state, and whether the movement of the gaze can be converted into the movement of an object.

What matters in this exhibition is not only the formal completeness of each individual painting, but the total sensation produced by the distances between works, lighting, circulation, and empty space. Adjacent paintings become each other’s afterimages and grounds, while movement inside and outside the picture plane is experienced through the viewer’s body. Works from this period deliberately restrain narrative, allowing material, atmosphere, void, and gaze to operate together as an exhibition system.
 
The ‘Depth Study’(2021-) series, developed after 2021, and the ‘Mining Depth’ series from 《Angel Tail》 bring questions of light, depth, and embodied viewing to the fore. In Depth Study 06(2021), acrylic, spray, and airbrush reduce the direct trace of the hand, forming fog-like surfaces made through paint, air, and gravity. In the ‘Mining Depth’ series, canvases of different sizes are combined like fragmented diagrams, while rounded empty corners and waves of color create gaps in the field of vision.

Up close, the viewer perceives particles and texture; from a distance, the flow of light and the overall structure appear. The viewer moves between the microscopic world of the individual canvas and the macroscopic structure of the whole not only with the eyes, but with the entire body. In 《Lagrange Point》(DrawingRoom, Seoul, 2022-2023), Park used the concept of the gravitational balance point between two celestial bodies as a basis for experimenting with distance, balance, and variable paths between paintings by sharing the edges of the picture plane with another artist.
 
After 《Vortex 8》, Park’s formal experimentation expands further into movement, material, and support. The ‘Vortex-Counterpoint’(2023) series began from a simulation of the solar system orbiting the center of the galaxy and a mobile titled “Counterpoint,” translating the heightened state of motion inside a vortex into painting. In the ‘Old Present’(2023) series and Dark Mining, fixed orientation becomes unstable or projection and recession repeat, disturbing the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, materiality and immateriality.

In 《Teal Greenhouse》, truncated circles, ovals, rectangles, and irregular panels appear, while immaterial modes of image production such as image-generation programs, big-data-based AI, and software are combined with gel, cement, minerals, clay, acrylic medium, stone, and architectural materials.

In recent works such as Temple Dawn 06 and Temple Incognita 01, the artist mixes pigments, acrylic paste, and gel medium, spreading them with a knife or alternating airbrush and brush to create complex layers of thick and thin texture. For Park, material, technique, and the form of the support are not fixed conventions, but conditions for testing a different question through painting each time.

Topography & Continuity

Park Seok Min organizes the conditions of sensation that arise between the visible and the invisible through surface and space. He works with subjects such as urban architectural fragments, reflected and refracted light, voids, mist, vortices, greenhouses, terrariums, burnt trees, stone towers, and pools of water, but does not fix them as single symbols.

Instead, he leaves within the picture plane the unstable state before an object is identified, the tremor before it is explained. For this reason, his paintings move between figuration and abstraction, landscape and structure, image and event, leading viewers to ask not so much “what am I seeing?” as “how am I seeing?”
 
Park begins with ‘Temporary Orbit’, which transformed everyday space into a cosmic sensation, and in 《Melting a Lump Sugar》, he explored the conditions under which painting and exhibition space could operate as a single sensory system. In 《Angel Tail》 and the ‘Mining Depth’ series, the question of looking expanded into bodily movement and layered depth, while in 《Lagrange Point》, questions of the path of light, will, result, and variable orbit were tested through collaboration and juxtaposition.

In 《Vortex 8》, the painterly translation of movement and spatiotemporal perception became central, and in 《Teal Greenhouse》, the closed-loop ecosystem and near-futuristic sensibility suggested the possibility that painting could operate like a living organism that mutates and proliferates on its own. This trajectory is less a linear narrative of stylistic development than a constellation-like structure in which questions from different periods flash up and reconnect.
 
Park designs the exhibition as an event, positioning each picture plane as a coordinate that responds to others within that event. A work appears differently when seen up close or from a distance, from the front or while moving through space. He also uses generative images, AI, architectural materials, spray, airbrush, and shaped panels, yet he does not foreground technological novelty for its own sake. Rather, he focuses on how these tools and materials may alter the sensation of the “present.”

In this sense, his painting is a visual image and a spatial device at the same time; a static object that nevertheless induces movement. Park’s work has continued to unfold not only as formal experimentation within painting, but also across different environments, including museums, galleries, collaborative exhibitions, and residency programs. His future practice will likely continue to move between material painting and immaterial images, between real places and speculative spaces, revealing in different forms the sensations of the present that we have not yet learned how to name.