Dawoon Park
Dawoon Park (b. 1991, South Korea) is an artist and researcher whose work begins with sensory, emotional, and psychic experiences that resist immediate recognition or clear definition. Rather than dismissing them as irrational, insignificant, or merely private, she examines how such experiences are shaped by cultural conventions, social relations, and structures of power, and how they may offer other ways of perceiving and understanding the world. Moving across different materials, gestures, images, sounds, objects, and spatial situations, her practice makes these experiences perceptible without fixing them into a single interpretation. Her work is informed by her Korean cultural background and by an interest in how experience is carried, altered, and remembered through the body. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Binational Artistic PhD Program at the University of the Arts Bremen and the University of Groningen.
RESUME
Academic Qualification
PhD Candidate. Binational Artistic PhD Program. University of the Arts Bremen (HfK Bremen), Germany, and University of Groningen, the Netherlands. (2024–present)
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)
Iconic Translation: Korean Sound Symbolism and Echoing Gesture. Revised research exposition under review at the Journal for Artistic Research. (2025–present)
Scores of Scores (Unfolding). Group Exhibition. Galerie der HBKsaar, Saarbrücken, Germany (2026)
Dialogue as Score: Activating A-phonie. Artistic Research Presentation. Joint Colloquium of the Binational Artistic PhD Program, University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. (2026)
LOOP Crit: Open Presentations and Critique Program. Selected Artist Presentation. Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, South Korea (2025)
Absolute Approximation. Group Exhibition. 48 stunden neukölln festival, Magdalenenkirche Rixdorf, Berlin, Germany (2025)
Summersnowglobalism. Conference 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)
Academic & Professional Experience
Coordinator. Binational Artistic PhD Program. University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. (2026–present)
Seminar Leader. Echoic Translation through Gestures Across Media. University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. (2025–2026)
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 replicating what they see, participants reread and rewrite the image’s qualities through breath, movement, and sound, questioning what it means to read and write an image while enacting an embodied iconicity that transforms vision into rhythm, texture, and resonance.
Mixed-media installation with biological process, and tactile material, dimensions variable, 2022
The performative installation unfolds as a ‘queer’ snow globe, within which decaying rice grains float in a microbial mixture inspired by the brewing of dongdongju, a traditional Korean rice wine named after dongdong (동동), a korean ideophone describing grains floating in liquid. Through material experimentation and an engagement with sound symbolism as a mode of signification, the project explores the relationship between vision and touch as intertwined modes of knowing.
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. At the same time, the snow globe becomes a ‘carrier bag of fiction’, holding stories of relation, interdependence, and sustainment while suspending and unsettling hegemonic orders of space and time. As a symbolic apparatus that separates the observed from the observer, the snow globe is reconfigured as a fermentation vessel in which material transformation dissolves rigid boundaries and gives rise to forms of collective life without a fixed shape.
The development of the artwork was supported by Arts Council Korea.