Isoalted System 2 - K-ARTIST

Isoalted System 2

2018
Rotating Turntable (1rpm), Round glass mirror, resin cast skull
160 x 160 x 50 cm
About The Work

Kwanwoo Park approaches the human being as a “phenomenon,” addressing in his practice issues such as consciousness and self-consciousness through perception, the tension between reality and fiction as mediated by “belief,” as well as questions of migration and identity.
 
The artist experiments with liminal space-time beyond conventional categories by creating devices to capture phenomena, staging scenes that evoke a microscopic sense of perception, orchestrating collective situations in which the boundary between subject and object dissolves, or designing singular experiences that can exist only through testimony.
 
Rather than representing human modes of being and self-consciousness through specific images or messages, Kwanwoo Park has set conditions for their emergence, presenting a range of experiments that unfold as exclusive experiences for each individual viewer. Through these works, he creates ruptures in existing perceptual frameworks and senses surrounding the “self,” prompting questions about the relationships between oneself, others, and the world.

Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Park’s solo exhibitions include 《Witnesses and Testimonies》 (Culture Salon 5120, Seoul, 2023), 《Strange Dream/Gold Cases》 (The Reference, Seoul, 2023), 《Club Reality》 (Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《A Dance with a Wolf》 (Platform-L Contemporary Art Center, Seoul, 2021), and more.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Park has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Create Together, Change Tomorrow》 (Hangram Design Museum, Seoul, 2025), 《No-Reply》 (Art Center Art Moment, Seoul, 2024), 《Skin, The Deepest Part》 (Sehwa Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Voices from the Walls》 (Art Space Hohwa, Seoul, 2023), 《2022 ZER01NE DAY》 (S-Factory, Seoul, 2022), 《Turing Test: An AI's Love Confession》 (Seoul National University Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), and 《2021 ZER01NE DAY》 (Wonhyoro Hyundai Motors Service Center, Seoul, 2021).

Awards (Selected)

Park has also served as lead artist for Hyundai Motor Group’s ZER01NE Z-Lab (2020) and participated as a ZER01NE Creator (2019).

Residencies (Selected)

Park was selected as an artist-in-residence at the Hoban Cultural Foundation H-Art Lab (2022–2023) and the MMCA Goyang Residency (2021).

Works of Art

Liminal Space-Time beyond Conventional Categories

Originality & Identity

Kwanwoo Park’s practice begins from the premise that the human is not a fixed entity but an ever-emerging phenomenon. Early works foreground ruptures in perception between self and other. Tomorrow(2014), Stranger(2017), and the 'Tell me that I’m here'(2019) series use mirror-like screens, periscopic structures, and crossed viewpoints to make viewers experience the gap between “the me I see” and “the me seen by others.” Grounded in the proposition that “truth is the belief we construct about it,” Park frames world-knowledge as a phenomenon that keeps forming and drifting rather than a settled conclusion. Even a planar work like Tunnel Model 2(2017) extends this interest in perceptual error and reconstruction.

His inquiry then expands to the reliability of speaking/listening and testimony. The 'Human Conversation'(2018– ) series interweaves human-written and AI-generated sentences to blur the speaking subject, staging situations where meaning “works” while “understanding” slips. In the solo exhibition 《Witnesses and Testimonies》(Culture Salon 5120, 2023), Park probes the ethics and fictionality of events that exist only through testimony, bringing to the fore the gray zone of reality/unreality mediated by belief. The solo show 《Strange Dream / Gold Cases》(The Reference, 2023) varies this focus by invoking exclusive experiences and invisible interior narratives.

Park’s work then scales into art as “event.” Do Androids Feel like Dancing?(2019) blends numerous performers with the audience to smudge boundaries of identity and role; A Dance with a Wolf(2021) converts the rules of single-viewer entry and controlled information into content centered on relational affect. Club Reality(2022) constructs an eleven-week collective psychodrama under the rule “every utterance is a lie,” experimentally advancing the thesis that “identity = enacted belief/consensus.”

Most recently, Park sharpens his focus on the “assembly” of self across emotion, memory, and worldview. Human Conversation 5(2024) mixes improvisational responses by human interpreters with AI outputs and introduces a 5 Hz inter-screen frequency offset—inducing theta-like dream states—to make visible not the “authenticity” of affect but its conditions of construction. The group exhibition 《Skin, The Deepest Part》(Sehwa Museum of Art, 2024) further extends his scope to the boundaries of the physical body/digital human and issues of migration and identity.

Style & Contents

Park’s formal language begins with material devices. Tomorrow replays “a stranger’s gaze from 24 hours prior” via a mirror-like screen with camera/projector; Stranger uses an aluminum periscope to make viewers confront “the back of their own head” as if it were Other. The 'Tell me that I’m here' series cross-owns fields of view through HMDs and 180-degree cameras, inscribing a visual/tactile mismatch onto the body. Here, devices act not as representational tools but as “add-ons to life,” designed to blur the obvious and crack the intact—purpose-built generators of productive error.

These devices soon shift into immaterial protocols. Do Androids Feel like Dancing? operates as experimental performance/psychodrama: instead of choreography, performers follow rules (gradually intensifying dance; “freeze” on cue) that unsettle the audience–performer boundary. A Dance with a Wolf establishes an exclusive, generative structure—single-viewer time slots, no recording, and the mediating “interpreter”—so the event persists only as memory. Content moves from depicting objects to modulating relations and affect; form migrates from object to the design of rules, time, and encounter.

Park’s collective narratives acquire an engine. Club Reality ties together the rule “every utterance = false,” eleven weekly episodes, and a diary-as-testimony archive to convert the event into post-facto text and a party-like exhibition site. In 《Strange Dream / Gold Cases》, the city’s spatial context becomes an expanded stage that shuttles between “inside/outside” of the event, while 《Witnesses and Testimonies》 treats the assembly of collective testimonies as both content and form.

Recently, media vocabulary expands through AI and psychophysiological elements. Within 'Human Conversation', two-channel dialogues absorb AI scripts to render meaning legible while the subject remains indeterminate. Especially in Human Conversation 5, the improvisational psychodrama format couples AI Q&A with a 5 Hz frequency offset to systematically compose “affective (de)synchronization.”

Topography & Continuity

Through an arc from device → protocol → system, Park has established an event-based vocabulary that cross-threads perception, belief, and testimony in contemporary Korean art. Early object-devices (TomorrowStranger) destabilized cognitive frames of self/other; mid-period rule design (Do Androids…A Dance with a Wolf) turned relation and affect into content. Collective systems (Club Reality) and the 'Human Conversation' series specify the conditions of testimony and dialogue at a systemic level, elevating the politics of reality/fiction—mediated by belief—into a contemporary agenda.

The developmental trajectory is concise: (1) from material devices to immaterial rules/procedures; (2) from individual perception to the affect/ethics of relation and community; (3) from vision-centric dissonance to adjustments involving language, voice, and brainwave; (4) from single-site display to multi-stage ecologies spanning city, archive, and party. Recent exhibitions—《Skin, The Deepest Part》(Sehwa Museum of Art, 2024) and 《(no-reply) Do Not Reply》(Art Centre Art Moment, 2024)—translate these transitions into institutional exhibition language.

Today, Park’s position is defined by protocol-based liveness that co-activates body, affect, and language. By reducing institutional devices (of museums) to sensory rules and re-testing the reality of dialogue via AI/interpreters/testimonies, he realizes a rare combination across performance, media, and socially engaged art. Looking ahead, he is poised to refine parameters of testimony, memory, frequency, and interaction while sustaining the core of “designing conditions for events that survive as testimony.” His open-ended, after-the-fact event—an ongoing case—can be localized across global contexts through concise rules (entry, role, testimony, no-recording), multilingual interpreters, and site-specific episodes, and thus iteratively renewed on international stages.

Works of Art

Liminal Space-Time beyond Conventional Categories

Articles

Exhibitions

Activities