Hyunjin Park

Lives and works in NYC, NY

Artist statement

I create environments where animals, machines, and plants come together. My work explores forms of care and kinship that emerge between species and across the boundaries of life and death, the organic and the synthetic. I work with materials that exist in-between. Terracotta holds earth in suspension, its life halted by fire. Taxidermy foam gives form to the void where a body once was. Beeswax becomes surrogate flesh for animal skulls. Fabric, stitched by hand over a year, accumulates into a soft sculpture that carries the duration of its making. When two Korean traditional lion dancers enter this textile body, the sculpture crosses from object into creature, from stillness into breath. These materials resist fixed categories, existing between past and present, life and death, presence and absence. In my early work, I focused on how intimate relationships are formed through acts of caring for living plants and attending to the bodies and memories of animals. As my practice developed, however, I became interested in how care and protection do not always function as positive acts. Acts of care can also involve structures of control and training: intervening in order to protect, restricting behavior in the name of care, and training or regulating another’s actions in order to maintain a relationship. This interest has expanded beyond human-animal relationships to include machines and artificial intelligence. For example, I trained my AI robotic dog to participate in a dog...

Artwork