Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Seungwon Park has presented solo exhibitions at major art spaces in Seoul, including Ggool&Ggoolpool (2012), Media Theater i-Gong (2015), Amado Art Space (2016), Gallery Koo (2017), Boan Art Space (2019), PlanB project space (2022), S.ONE project (2024), and Space Rora (2025).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Seungwon Park has participated in group exhibitions at major museums in Korea and abroad, including the Seoul National University Museum of Art (2017, 2019), Nam June Paik Art Center (2010, 2015, 2021, 2023), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2015), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (2021), Doosan Gallery (2018), ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2013), Tate Modern (2010), and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2014).

Awards (Selected)

Seungwon Park was selected for the SeMA Emerging Artists Support Program in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Celeste Art Prize 09 in 2009.

Residencies (Selected)

Seungwon Park participated in the Community Space Litmus International Residency (2012), the Nanji Residency at the Seoul Museum of Art (2014), and the Goyang Residency at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2015).

Collections (Selected)

Works by Seungwon Park are included in the collections of the Seoul Museum of Art, Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, and Yangpyeong Art Museum.

Originality & Identity

The work of Seungwon Park begins with an inquiry into forms of existence that lie outside anthropocentric systems of order and language. Working primarily with performance and video, Park reveals tensions between human and animal, language and gesture, civilization and instinct, while questioning the social structures and norms that define human existence.

In particular, his long-running “becoming-animal” projects, initiated during his years in Germany, attempt to move beyond human language and identity in order to establish contact with the other, forming one of the central concepts that runs throughout his practice.

Through repeated gestures and guttural vocalizations directed toward animals such as chimpanzees and lions, Park attempts forms of communication that extend beyond mere imitation or performative reenactment. Rather, he seeks to rethink the relationship between humans and the world through pre-linguistic sensation, affect, and nonverbal bodily flows.

In his work, the body is not a tool for conveying meaning but a sensory field that precedes social language systems and a medium through which the possibility of contact with the other is tested.

Park’s practice frequently evokes contemporary conditions of solitude, anxiety, and alienation, though these are not presented as psychological representations so much as existential conditions embodied through physical states and actions.

Repetitive gestures, unstable movements, and irrational acts simultaneously visualize the disconnection and tension experienced within contemporary society while functioning as attempts to escape systems centered on language and rationality. In this process, the artist continually traverses the boundaries between human and nonhuman, reason and instinct, communication and impossibility.

His work resonates closely with concepts such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “becoming-animal,” Franz Kafka’s A Report to an Academy, and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of gesture, exploring the possibility of nonlinguistic practices of thought enacted through the body.

For Park, performance is not a theatrical act that delivers a complete narrative, but an experimental process through which the body itself establishes relations with the world. Through this approach, he constructs a distinctive artistic practice that reconsiders the meaning of human existence and corporeality within contemporary art.

Style & Contents

Working primarily with performance and video alongside drawing, installation, and sound, Seungwon Park has consistently explored ways of physically exposing movement and sensation through the body. In his practice, the body functions not merely as an object of representation but as a living field of sensation that experiences tension, collision, repetition, and exhaustion.

Through the repeated execution of simple and primal actions — walking, rolling, roaring, striking, and swaying — Park intensifies bodily rhythm and perception. Rather than conveying a fixed narrative, these actions reveal the conditions and states in which the body itself exists.

Park’s performances are grounded in an interest in pre-linguistic gestures and nonverbal forms of communication. He pushes his body toward physical extremes by imitating the movements and cries of chimpanzees and lions or by repeatedly performing unstable actions atop precarious structures. Yet these acts remain distant from theatrical role-play or dramatic representation.

Instead, Park seeks to expose the boundaries between human and nonhuman, reason and instinct, through the body’s processes of sensing and responding. In his work, performance becomes less a vehicle for delivering meaning than an experimental act of establishing relations with the world through the body itself.

Video functions simultaneously as documentation of performance and as an independent sculptural language. Through single-channel and multi-channel formats, Park constructs sensory relationships between repetitive gestures, sounds, unstable movements, and strange assemblages of objects.

In works such as Korean Groove, performance documentation merges with installation, lighting, sound, and objects to produce an environment that is at once chaotic and playful. Cheap plastic materials, fluorescent devices, and exaggerated sound effects reflect the instability and sensory excess of contemporary urban environments while generating a distinctive atmosphere in which humor and anxiety coexist.

Although Park’s work often incorporates absurd and exaggerated gestures, it is ultimately grounded in fundamental questions surrounding human existence. Through repetitive actions and situations of failed communication, he reveals conditions of desire, anxiety, isolation, and survival while examining how the body is controlled by social norms and linguistic systems.

These formal experiments fluidly traverse the boundaries between performance, video, and installation, exposing the complex sensory and structural conditions surrounding the body.

Topography & Continuity

From his early performances to his recent works, Seungwon Park has consistently maintained an inquiry into the conditions of human existence and corporeality. Beginning with the ‘siaraM’ series produced during his years in Germany, his attempts to communicate with animals gradually expanded into broader explorations of the relationships between human and nonhuman, language and gesture, society and isolation.

The early works, in which he repeatedly performed gestures and guttural vocalizations toward chimpanzees and lions, evolved into investigations of the anxiety and tension experienced by the body within urban space and social structures, remaining central to his practice today.

While shifting across performance, video, and installation, Park has continuously explored sensory experience and nonverbal communication through the body. Repetitive movements, failed communication, precarious states of balance, and exaggerated gestures recur throughout different periods of his practice in varying forms, yet ultimately converge around themes of existential anxiety and isolation within contemporary society.

This continuity does not emerge from the repetition of a particular style, but from the artist’s persistent attempt to perceive and relate to the world through the body itself.

Although his work reflects the conditions of contemporary urban environments and social systems, it does not remain bound solely to a specific temporality. Rather, Park persistently seeks to fracture anthropocentric systems of order and language while exploring bodily possibilities that traverse the boundaries between human and animal, reason and instinct, meaning and meaninglessness.

In this process, the works often remain incomplete or unresolved, yet this very incompletion and persistence become essential driving forces within his practice.

Even in his recent works, Park continues to focus on bodily movement, sensation, and the possibility of contact with the other. Repeated gestures and sounds, alongside situations in which humor and tension coexist, expose the instability of human existence while simultaneously searching for new forms of sensation and relation beyond language and institutional structures.

Through this sustained approach, Park’s practice extends beyond the mere documentation of performance or the representation of action, evolving into an ongoing inquiry into the conditions of contemporary human existence and the body.