Nara Park, Mediation IV, 2023, 3D printed nylon, sand, stainless steel shelving table, aluminum trays, 90x60x90cm © Nara Park

Two conversations with Nara Park in 2024 were both conducted online. In spring 2024, I viewed her work in person at her studio in SeMA Nanji Residency. The works I saw at the studio dealt with the relationship between images and actual materiality. The artist mentioned that she had recently been immersed in using mouthwash as a material. Subsequently, she created a new work titled Sterilization of Fate in 2024.

This work, using materials such as beeswax, a medical cart, deodorant, a water tank, and a pump, addresses the issue of death that the artist has consistently explored. More importantly, everything is laid out horizontally, and the sculpture itself moves with its own internal dynamic. Since the work has a scent (fragrance), this scent cannot be the same every day within the space

I also spent a long time viewing the artist’s work at the Changwon Sculpture Biennale 《silent apple》, which ran from September 27 to November 10, 2024. What was interesting in this extended period of viewing was the fact that Park’s work is always in constant change. Indeed, Kneaded Reflections, credited as being made in 2023, emits an odor when approached because it uses flour, enzymes, sugar, and eggs as materials.

Therefore, it could also be captioned as a newly created work in 2024, and it is destined to change whenever it is exhibited elsewhere in the future, inevitably interacting with the air and smells of each specific location.

Kneaded Reflections cannot be touched. However, this protruding bread-body sculpture simultaneously evokes tactile and olfactory sensations. As significant as the artist’s statement that she became immersed in this work through observing her body’s changes during pregnancy and nursing is the fact that the work’s other materials—artificial nails and artificial ants— created an illusion of trying to escape somewhere during the exhibition period.

Yes, these pink nails and ants remained in place at one exhibition hall of the Changwon Sculpture Biennale, which used to be a kitchen, yet they seemed to keep shifting subtly, like fog that lifts and disappears before one’s eyes.

Another work at the Sculpture Biennale, Mediation IV, stimulates desires for change and movement. On aluminum trays lie sand, with sensory organs—eyes, nose, ears, and mouth— scattered like fragmented objects. The artist created this scene by 3D scanning her own body and 3D printing stones brought from a mountain.

Though they had no wheels, these sensory organs (eyes, nose and mouth) perched on the stainless steel table like seaweed on a plate resembled upright soldiers ready to escape somewhere.


Nara Park, Kneaded Reflections, 2023, bench, flour, yeast, baking powder, butter, sugar, salt, eggs, water, vanilla extract, water, olive oil, preservative, false nails, plastic ants, Dimensions variable © Nara Park

The two works invited to the exhibition 《silent apple》 shared this potential for change and movement. Both works are positioned for viewers to look down upon from above, and can be considered sculptures with inherently horizontal compositions.

Both Kneaded Reflections, utilizing a low bench and flour enzymes, and Mediation IV, with its layered tray structure supporting objects on sand, were created as a kind of surrounding where viewers could wander around while engaging in dialogue with the work. In other words, rather than constructing certain forms or images through sculpture, the artist deconstructs them.

Witnessing how her own body and others’ bodies change and sometimes disappear, she articulates this process through the vocabulary of horizontal sculpture. For the artist, real stones brought from mountains and artificial stones have always been important subjects of study.

From the artist’s statement that “I expressed as if our sensory organs, the tools through which we perceive the world, remain as mediators connecting us with the world even after our death,” we can understand why this work is titled Mediation. Nara Park began the series with ‘Mediation I’ in 2020, where a stone sits atop the form of a severed ankle.

During our two online conversations last summer, I focused on two topics. First, we discussed and questioned how the issues of sculpture and sculptural quality had developed into specific visual vocabulary for the artist who spent a long time in the United States. For her, the United States was both a place (local area) where she resided for an extended period and a place where she acquired the visual language of sculpture.

The artist’s experience in the United States appears to have provided opportunities to explore various natural environments, land, stones, and natural history within its vast territory.

In particular, for the work The Beginning of Everything (2021), the artist was inspired by a meteorite that fell in Arizona approximately 50,000 years ago. She covered the work’s surface with glass beads used for road markings to make it emit light by reflecting surrounding light. This work was exhibited at the entrance of the Washington Harbor in Washington, D.C. in 2021.

In the work Parallels IV (2021), the artist was also inspired by a meteorite that fell in Arkansas, creating the work using 3D printing and PVC pipes. It became clear that the relationship between real and fake, images and threedimensional entities, artifacts and natural objects had long been subjects of Park’s inquiry.

Rather than focusing on the specific cultural conditions of the United States, the artist approaches objects in detail, concentrating on the relationship between humans and materials at a universal level. For instance, the artist writes in her note: “My more recent works explore the physical limitations of our body, such as connecting the body and objects by placing body parts made of beeswax artificial cherry-fragrance and cheese on a step stool.”

Another focus of our online conversations was a two-dimensional work, The Clock Store (2018). This work, which began with scanning drawings of clocks the artist made in childhood, was digitally printed on canvas with frayed edges. The artist digitally collaged childhood clock drawings onto a photograph of rock, making them appear like marks drawn on stone.

Looking at other inkjet print photographic works on her website (for example, Transference I from 2018), I could sense that for the artist, the hand that sculpts and the hand that touches stone are not so different. Whether it’s actual stone in the mountains or stone output printed as virtual images, we are mediated through different layers of reality and unfamiliar sensations each time. This is why I kept thinking about the scent of disinfectant from her work at SeMA Nanji Residency even as we conversed online.

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