Fragments of the past,
shards of the future

Park Sohyeong's practice has never settled into a single medium or a single city. After a BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York (2021) and an MFA in Sculpture at Boston University (2023), she has continued to work across Seoul, Boston, and New York — three art ecologies with different materials, audiences, and weather.

Sculpture is her base, but installation and video pull the work outward into space and time, and AI-based media work pulls it toward the screen. Rather than treating these as separate practices, she lets them inform one another: a sculpture can become the set for a video; a video can become the documentation of an installation that no longer exists. The result is a practice that is less a fixed object than an ongoing process.

That mobility is also a method. Moving between cities and disciplines, she keeps the work attentive to context — to what a given place, material, or technology makes newly visible.

At the centre of the work is living material. Plants and mushroom spores recur not as decoration but as collaborators — organisms with their own time, growth, and decay. Working with spores means working with something that changes after it leaves the artist's hands; the sculpture is never quite finished.

This ecological attention is also a political one. Park is a member of I3C (Inspiring Climate Change), a Boston artist group responding to the climate crisis, and of Green Recipe Lab, a group of Korean women artists. Her exhibitions — 〈Changing tides〉, 〈Future Yarning〉, the 〈Digital Soup residency〉 — return again and again to questions of environment, scale, and what it means to make art on a warming planet.

The smallest organism, in her work, carries the largest scale: a single spore stands in for an ecosystem, and an ecosystem for a planet under pressure.

In 2025, Park Sohyeong held an invited solo exhibition at Gallery Cheongpung in Gangneung, under the title 〈Recording the Day When Fragments of the Past and Shards of the Future Pass By〉. The title is itself a thesis: a form that can register both what has already broken away and what has not yet taken shape.

For an artist who works with spores and AI in the same breath, the title opens a reading. The spore can read as a fragment of the past — a remnant, a survival, a carrier of deep biological time. The AI-generated image can read as a shard of the future — provisional, synthetic, arriving before we are ready for it. To hold both in a single work might be to make time itself the material.

Across her shows — from Boston to Busan, from Emerson College to Gallery Cheongpung — the work keeps recording that passing day: the moment when the decayed and the not-yet-arrived brush past each other, and a form is left to hold the trace.