Originality & Identity

Sora Park’s practice initially stemmed from a critical inquiry into how art is consumed and experienced within social relations. Art souvenir £££ (2018) transformed visitors’ reviews into 3D-printed keychains, reconfiguring them as “art souvenirs.” This process destabilized the hierarchy between the original and the by-product and relocated traces of art experience into the realm of everyday objects. Such early works highlighted the inversion of boundaries between art and consumption, and between the producer and the audience.

After returning to Korea from the UK, Park shifted her focus toward the relationship between digital media environments and the human body. Works such as Item Inventory (2021) and Connect-Disconnect-Reconnect (2021) began from references to game characters, wearable devices, and emotion-training tools, thereby exploring the extension of body and self while imagining the transformation of human experience under the influence of technological advancement.

Soft Touch (2022) and Meta Beauty Innovation (2024) introduced fictional characters and corporate settings, envisioning futuristic beauty devices and digital humans. These works reimagined the body and appearance as freely mutable entities, expanding questions of desire and commodification into a new dimension.

Her recent work Dea’s Day (2025), presented at Boan1942, follows the daily routine of an influencer navigating neoliberal self-help discourse and platform capitalism, where the individual is continually datafied and optimized. The piece exposes the illusion of productivity, as well as the anxiety and burnout that ensue. From the critique of art consumption to explorations of digital selves, virtual bodies, and the logics of platform capitalism, Park’s conceptual trajectory consistently investigates how contemporary existence is reshaped under the forces of technology and market structures.

Style & Contents

Formally, Park synthesizes sculpture, installation, video, and text. In Art souvenir £££ she employed 3D printing to translate exhibition experiences into souvenirs, while in Item Inventory she reproduced game items through ceramics, creating an uncanny conjunction of traditional materiality with digital imagery. This hybridization of the virtual and the real, the digital and the handcrafted, underscores her formal strategy.

In Connect-Disconnect-Reconnect she sculpted futuristic wearable devices through 3D modeling and printing, presenting them as science-fictional design prototypes. By contrast, City Fence (2022) adopted a participatory installation format, transforming digital interfaces into physical fence-like structures that reveal sensory discrepancies experienced at the threshold of the physical and the virtual. Through these varied strategies, Park actively mediates the viewer’s bodily and perceptual engagement.

Works such as Soft Touch and Meta Beauty Innovation integrated sculptural prototypes with video, fictional dialogues, and interactive exhibition devices to construct multilayered sensory environments. Notably, in her solo exhibition 《Meta Beauty Innovation》, visitors were invited to “wear” the artwork via Instagram filters, thereby translating the circulation of self-images in digital space into the context of physical exhibition.

The ‘City Fence’ (2022–), presented in multiple contexts including the MMCA exhibition 《What Things Dream About》 (2024), further expanded her installation practice by converting digital interface structures into material fences. These works reconceptualize the relationship between body, space, and digital boundary-making, demonstrating how her sustained interest in the digital–real continuum has evolved through site-specific and participatory experiments.

Topography & Continuity

Sora Park occupies a distinctive position in the contemporary Korean art field as an artist who probes the triangular nexus of “digital–body–commodity.” Her works scrutinize how bodies and selves are commodified and consumed as images within digital media environments, exposing these processes through speculative narratives and fictional product scenarios. Beyond conventional discourses of technological critique, her practice distinguishes itself by visualizing contemporary cultural dynamics as foreseeable, narrativized futures.

In particular, by conceiving wearable devices for digital humans or inventing fictional commodities that reconfigure the body, Park has effectively pioneered a critical genre of the “commodified future.” Such works resonate with familiar modes of consumer culture while prompting reflection on the bodily and social transformations ushered in by accelerated technological development.

Her artistic trajectory has moved from explorations of avatars and game environments, to corporate and product-centered science-fictional narratives, and most recently to participatory installations that interrogate the thresholds between digital and physical spaces. This progression demonstrates a sustained expansion in the ways she integrates media, spatial structures, and narrative strategies.