EUGENE PARK

Sculpture, Found Objects, Installation Art

City: Vancouver, British Columbia

Website: http://parkeugene.com/

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/studio.eugene_park/

Artist Statement: My work revolves around the porosity of the entity by exploring the material entanglement which surrounds us. I believe the sculpture is not only inhered in the materials but also in the immaterial connection among them. The unorthodox materials that I use such as kombucha sheets, jelly, soil, fungus, magnet and objects like a compass, mirror, level bubbles are precariously juxtaposed in the form of installation to reveal their agencies.

A material in proximity to another has a chance to affect the other. At a certain distance, materials keep touching and changing each other by penetrating each other’s sovereignty. Throughout this intra-action, the entanglement of materials makes their own logic of behaviours and process of thinking, which includes the spectators to become part of their intercommunication as well.

The porosity of being causes unsettlement and precarity for the spectators. The boundary of bodies becomes blurred through those interchange and exchange between interior and exterior realms of being. As Donna Haraway beautifully depicted, “The human genomes can be in only about 10% of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 % of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists and such... To be one is always to become with many.” In my installation, all the participants actively build the exhibition together. In this way, making art is an endless experiment for me to reconfigure this ongoing nonhierarchical dialogue between human and non-human agents.

Biography: Eugene Park is an artist who is based in Vancouver, Canada and Seoul, South Korea. She explores the porosity of the entity through the material entanglement around us. She uses unorthodox materials like kombucha sheets, soil, earth magnet and objects like a compass, level bubbles, mirrors. She makes small and big installations with those materials which are not only visual but also multi-sensual. Through the juxtaposition of the installation, she lets the materials’ immanent agencies imbue the space and spectator’s bodies. She hopes to find the not-yet-ignited narrative by paying attention to objects and their behaviours.

She got a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea and also a Master’s degree in Studio Arts from Concordia University in Montreal. She received the Sylvie and Simon Blais award for emerging visual artists from Sylvie and Simon Blais Foundation in Montreal and Yeon Tak Chang Scholarship from the Korean Canadian Scholarship Foundation in Toronto.