Dawoon Park
Dawoon Park works across video, installation, and performance, examining how perception, language, and form interact and shift across different contexts. Her practice focuses on how images, gestures, and sounds are interpreted, restructured, and experienced through various mediums.
She often explores the points at which different forms of expression overlap—where a visual element might be transformed into movement or tactile quality. Instead of presenting clear or fixed meanings, her work encourages viewers to consider how understanding is shaped through process, repetition, and the way elements are arranged over time.
dpark@hfk-bremen.de
https://d4w8n.net/
RESUME
Academic Qualification
Master of Arts. New Media. Visual Communication. Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Germany. (2022)
Adaptation Study (Anpassungsstudium). New Media. Visual Communication. Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Germany. (2021)
Bachelor of Fine Arts. Communication Design. Dankook University. South Korea. (2015)
Artistic & Academic Presentations (Recent)
Absolute Approximation. Group Exhibition. 48 stunden neukölln festival, Magdalenenkirche Rixdorf, Berlin, Germany (2025)
Summersnowglobalism. Publication. Proceedings of the ISEA 2025 – International Symposium on Electronic Art, Seoul, South Korea (2025)
Re Capitulating.queer. Art Residency and Open Studio. thealit Frauen.Kultur.Labor., Bremen, Germany (2024)
Scenes of Transformation and Resistance: Performing in Artistic Research. Performance and Talk. Binational Artistic PhD Program HfK Bremen in cooperation with Personal Structures, Palazzo Michiel (European Cultural Centre), Venice, Italy (2024)
Encounters in Artistic Research: Making, Thinking, Writing. Presentaion. The Research Centre Art & Society (Hanze) and the Research Centre Arts in Society (University of Groningen), Minerva Art Academy, Groningen, Netherlands (2024)
Nearly All Types of Honey Crystallize. Group Exhibition. Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, Germany (2024)
PORTFOLIO
Two-channel audio-visual installation, 5’51”, 2024
The video installation explores the idea of iconic translation—how visual impressions can be transformed into new sensory forms. Footage capturing light reflected on the surface of the Spree River—rippling waves, drifting clouds, and fleeting glints—is juxtaposed with Benjamin West’s Narcissus and Echo and a series of vocal-gestural performances. Rather than replicate what they see, participants re-read and re-write the image’s qualities through breath, movement, and sound—offering embodied responses that transform vision into rhythm, texture, and resonance.
The work draws on the myth of Narcissus and Echo to explore reflection and reverberation—not as fixed symbols, but as ongoing processes of difference and delay. Each gesture becomes a translation across mediums: visual to vocal, surface to depth, gaze to touch.
Editing itself performs alongside the body, shaping a rhythm of suspension, interruption, and return. Meaning unfolds not through clarity, but through misalignment, accumulation, and evocation—where echoes form, disperse, and return differently, refusing to settle into a single reading.
Mixed-media installation with biological process, and tactile material, dimensions variable, 2022
The performative installation unfolds as a ‘queer’ snow globe, inside which decaying rice grains float in a microbial admixture inspired by the brewing of dongdongju, a traditional Korean rice wine named after dongdong (동동), an ideophone that describes grains floating in liquid. The project engages critical thinking around mass plantation and display techniques during the modern period, as well as material experimentation and transmedia practices, to explore the relationship between vision and touch as foundations of knowledge.
Emphasizing the tactility of so-called ‘summer snow’—the fluffy seeds of poplar trees drifting through urban space—the installation reimagines these airborne particles as a microbial medium. In parallel, the snow globe, as a display object, becomes a carrier bag of fiction—for the story of relation and sustainment—suspending and unsettling hegemonic orders of space and time. The snow globe—a symbolic apparatus that divides the observed from the observing—is reimagined as a fermentation vessel, where materiality dissolves rigid boundaries and constitute a lived society without fixed form.
The development of artwork was supported by Arts Council Korea.
Transcription, Spoken Interview, dimensions variable, 2025
The ongoing series explores the transformation of spoken Korean into English-letter transcriptions that trace not only sound and rhythm, but also the peculiar order and contour of the language. Through an unconventional approach to translation, the work reveals both symmetry and asymmetry between source and target languages.
One episode recalls a childhood moment: a kindergarten assignment where the mother transcribed everything her child said—each hesitation, murmur, and moaning—capturing not just words, but also the intervals between them. Where does meaning begin—at the word, or in the space before it?
The resulting texts disturb readability, suspending the viewer between understanding and sensation. Meaning flickers, not as content, but as a trembling surface—where memory, language, and voice blur. Through fractured transcription, the work invites attention to drift, and opens space for the unspoken to resonate.