Park Sohyung works across Seoul, Boston and New York, joining discarded byproducts with natural material to build forms that do not last — and carrying the cardboard of her sculpture into the surface of a painting. Three works at SAF 2026.
Inside Park Sohyung's sculptures, the flowers wilt.
A dying flower is part of the structure. The artist describes the state as "precariously alive while dying." Rather than hiding the fact that a form will not last, she builds with it.
A Degree in Sculpture, and Then Past It
Park Sohyung works across Seoul, Boston, and New York.
She holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York (2021) and an MFA in Sculpture from Boston University (2023). The degrees say sculpture, but the practice does not stay in one medium. It moves through sculpture and installation, video, media work incorporating AI, and ecological art using plants and mushroom spores.
Her affiliations show the same range: the New England Sculpture Association (NESA), the Boston climate-crisis artist group I3C (Inspiring Climate Change), and the Korean women artists' group Green Recipe Lab — a sculptors' body, a climate group, and a women artists' collective at once.
In 2022 she was selected for What's Next: Perspectives, Micro to Macro at Emerson College Media Art Gallery, marking her as an emerging artist to watch in Boston. In 2023 she received a Cultural Sector Recovery Grant from the Mass Cultural Council, and from that year into the next she took part in the Digital Soup residency in Boston.
Built in the US, Carried to Korea
Laid out chronologically, the exhibition record shows the stage shifting.
From Bower Union in New York in 2021 through Knockdown Center and Boston's Piano Craft Gallery in 2022, the showings stayed within the United States. Across 2023 and 2024, the Digital Soup residency brought work to Cyber Art Gallery and the Fountain Street Art Sidewalk Gallery; in 2025 came 808 Commonwealth Gallery and the Hopkinton Center for the Arts.
That same year, the stage moves to Korea. She joined Urban Resistance at Arise Art Space in Busan, and opened her first invited solo exhibition — Recording the Day When Fragments of the Past and Pieces of the Future Pass By — at Gallery Cheongpung in Gangneung. In 2026 she enters the Artcation Goseong residency in Gangwon Province, and has entered three works in SAF 2026.
She has spoken as well as shown: the "Women and Masks" conference at Boston University in 2022, NESA's SculptureSlam in 2023, and Green Recipe Lab's "History and Present of Korean Ecological Art" in 2025.
Building With What Lost Its Use
〈The Little Prince's Rose〉 is a structure assembled from discarded human byproducts, joined with natural material.
The artist's own note names what the combination produces. As the flower dries and dies, the form takes on "an ironic humour — impermanent, changing, disappearing, vivid only for a while." The plaster and cardboard remain; the flower does not. What lasts and what goes stand together in one structure.
That it begins with discarded things reads alongside her work with a climate group and in ecological art.
Painting That Fills the Gap
Where does a sculptor's painting sit? The artist calls that place a "gap."
There is a distance, she writes, between a world that changes fast and thought that moves slowly, and painting becomes the space that fills it. Moments of daily experience and feeling are caught and carried into abstraction — what she calls "a connecting point between real space, the artist's contemplation, and the spiritual world."
〈Botanical Garden〉 is a 125×75cm work in which watercolour and ink drawing meet cardboard and hanji. The cardboard she uses in sculpture has crossed over into the surface of a painting.
〈Sensations in Passing〉 belongs to a series. Each piece stands alone and also forms one part of the whole. The phrase "passing by," which appears in the title of her Gangneung solo show, returns here in the title of the work.
Three Works at SAF 2026
Park Sohyung entered one sculpture and two paintings — the same crossing of media that marks her practice.
In the description of one entry, the artist wrote a line herself: "I am joining the fundraiser to save Oh Yun's mural."
84.9% of Korean artists are shut out of institutional finance. Works offered by the artists of SAF are sold, and the proceeds become a mutual-aid fund that reaches fellow artists facing financial discrimination as low-interest loans. The line Park Sohyung wrote is a commitment of her own work to that structure.
What Remains and What Goes
The plaster remains; the flower dries. Park Sohyung's forms hold both in one place.
Keeping a practice going has something of the same shape. It continues when materials and studio rent are within reach, and stops when they are not. When that split is decided by a loan review rather than by the work, a structure like SAF becomes necessary.
Park Sohyung's Works
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