To understand the work of artist Hyunsung Park, one must begin with Swinging (2018), which is also included in the current exhibition, I Reach Out to You in Stretched Forms (2024). This video documents the artist repeatedly swinging into a gallery wall with her knees while seated on a swing of her own making. Propelled by the pendulum motion of gravity and the artist’s body, the swing endlessly moves back and forth, crashing into the wall and gradually inflicting damage upon the performer’s own body.

This aggressive act toward a transparent wall appears almost like a shocking kind of frenzy—a violent mania bent on splitting the self apart. Perhaps, as Martin Heidegger theorized, the essential (Eigentliche) self—as a being uniquely its own—and the inauthentic (Uneigentliche) self—shaped through relationships with others—have become so entangled that the artist must resort to acts of self-destruction in order to forcibly separate them. By confronting the ultimate form of bodily destruction—death—the act induces anxiety (Angst), which, paradoxically, allows the “I” to be recovered from within the countless illusory personae imposed by society. It is through this compulsive confrontation with the self, in tension with others, that Hyunsung Park’s practice finds its core and driving force.

Fragmented Body

This theme of self-splitting and separation becomes more visibly articulated in Park’s recent works, including I Reach Out to You in Stretched Forms (2024) and Digesting Boundaries (2024). These works, composed primarily of fabric, take on the appearance of soft sculpture, reminiscent of artists like Magdalena Abakanowicz, Eva Hesse, and Lee Bul. Unlike works cast in robust materials such as steel, stone, or bronze—substances that endure the ravages of time—Park’s sculptures embody fragility and ephemerality through their light, easily torn forms. Just as soft textiles evoke human skin, these pliable materials inevitably come to symbolize human vulnerability in contrast to the symbolic permanence of harder media.

Park constructs abstract yet body-like forms using not only fabric and fiber but also IV stands, stainless steel, and PVC hoses. Draped over skeletal metal frameworks, mesh fabric is stretched taut like skin, pierced by sharp metal rods, or hangs loosely, pooling on the floor. These installations, suggestive of sagging skin, hands, internal organs, and shattered bones, resemble fragmented human figures reduced to partial objects. As we saw in Swinging, it is this very self—fractured and wounded—that the artist paradoxically seeks to preserve through acts of destruction.

Floating Yet Strangely Connected

Interestingly, Park eschews horizontally arranging her works in the gallery and instead opts to suspend them vertically in clusters. Hanging from above—or, at times, seeming to rise against gravity from below—her works produce an eerie sense of tension through their vertically suspended structures. Indeed, this tension has been a consistent aesthetic concern throughout Park’s practice, visible even in her early works involving chairs. Across her oeuvre, different elements press against each other at points of friction: hardness and softness, defined form and anti-form, order and chance. At times reminiscent of tortured bodies, and at others like hands yearning for connection, Park’s sculptures oscillate between pain and tenderness.

Furthermore, while her forms hang suspended in the air, none of them are completely disconnected from the ground. The fabric and materials, drooping just enough, touch the floor delicately, but not with enough force or structure to bear their weight independently. This detail might offer a subtle clue for understanding Park’s work. A sensation of floating while still being tenuously tethered—a strange kind of connection—could very well reflect her perspective on the world, and the way he relates to others.