Park Suk Won

Park Suk Won, Accumulation – 241104, Korean paper on canvas, 110 x 110 cm, 2024

Park Suk Won constructs his world through acts of repetition, accumulation, stacking, and layering. These aren’t mere acts of structural assemblage or formal arrangement. The primal gestures evident in his three-dimensional works, produced by cutting and rejoining stone and steel plates under a rubric of jeok (accumulation) or jeok-ui (accumulative intent), as well as his two-dimensional works involving tearing and reapplying Hanji onto canvas, connote temporality and spatiality, while simultaneously revealing the raw materiality of the media. Park’s works are born at the juncture between the act of stacking and the material’s response.

Park Suk Won, Accumulation – 250425, Korean paper on canvas, 91 x 117 cm, 2025

Structurally, Park’s stacked works resemble towers or monuments. Yet for the artist, stacking is not a drive toward completion but an ongoing state of generation, closer to the progressive rhythm of existence. This act of laying one layer upon another isn’t a repetition of redundant nature but rather what Gilles Deleuze calls the “repetition of difference,” a generative motion that begets subtle variations and new equilibria with each instance. The methodology of tearing and rearranging layers of Hanji onto canvas seen in Park’s recent works corresponds to his sculptural practice of vertical stacking, transposed into a horizontal register. The resulting Hanji planes evoke sectional diagrams of his three-dimensional works, with delicate and pliant fibers supplanting the coarse materiality of stone or steel.

Installation View (1)

This exhibition illuminates the ways in which Park’s gestures of stacking and layering, the properties of his materials, and the Korean sensibility mediated by Hanji recalibrate and propel one another as they shape Park’s artistic world. His works inquire into how existence emerges and takes form from sensation before representation, from material before meaning, and from structure before figure.

Installation View (2)

 At the artist’s hands, cement, steel, plaster, and Hanji transcend mere material to become stratal units inscribed with the memory, time, physicality, and spirit that make up the world. By stacking and layering matter, he reawakens the sediments of unspoken sensation and memory within us. These strata are at once solid and tender, and refined yet vital. Undivorced from life itself, Park’s art reveals the latent power of matter, opening fissures toward the invisible world to invite us into a realm of forgotten senses.

Kim Yisoon (Art historian and former professor at Hongik University)

Song Art Gallery
Acrovista Arcade, 188, Seochojungang-ro, Seocho-gu, Seoul, 06600, Republic of Korea
82 2 3482 7096

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