YAERIN PARK
Contemporary Art Historian, Critic, Curator, Writer
Based in Seoul, South Korea
ABOUT
Yaerin Park (she/her) is a contemporary art historian, critic, and curator based in Seoul, South Korea. She holds a BA in Art Studies from Hongik University and is currently completing her MA in Art History and Museology at Ewha Womans University. Park’s academic research investigates the intersections of media, technology, gender, and identity politics in post-1945 art, with a focus on the shifting boundaries of language, visibility, and representation.
Through her research, writing, and curatorial practice, Park seeks to critically address how art and visual culture negotiate the dynamics of power, mediation, and meaning in contemporary society.
Her academic pursuits have shaped her curatorial approach, leading to critically engaged projects such as “A Smooth World and Its Troubles” (2024, Tri-bowl, Incheon), “Burnt into Memories, Seeping into Your Eyes” (2024, Amado Art Space, Seoul), and “rete” (2023, Art Space Seogyo, Seoul). Park has also contributed as catalogue editor for the 15th Gwangju Biennale, reflecting her commitment to research-led and discursive forms of curatorial practice.
Her experience further extends to collaborative initiatives as the founding editor of epoché rete, an art criticism collective foregrounding dialogic modes of inquiry. Park’s achievements have been recognized with fellowships and grants, including the ARKO Critic LAB (Arts Council Korea), research fellowships from the Asia Culture Center, and grants from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.
yaerinpark.baguette@gmail.com
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ⓒ 2026 YAERIN PARK CV
Full CV available upon request.
Education
Ewha Womans University
MA Candidate, Art History & Museology
Hongik University
BA, Art Studies
Employment
Gwangju Biennale Foundation, Exhibition Team
Main Exhibition Catalogue Editor
Exhibition Coordinator / Assistant Manager
2024
Suwon Museum of Art, Curatorial TeamCuratorial Assistant / Exhibition Coordinator
2020, 2021
Writing
“Immaterial Bodies and Amorphous Paintings: On Jiun Koo’s World Sensed Anew,” 2025.
“A Footnote on Gippeume Gwak’s Media-Archaeological Practice,” 2025.
“The Face of Wind: On Allegories of Sadness and Breeze in Moon Chae-eun’s Painting,” 2025.
“At the Intersection of Gender Politics and Media Experiment: Mako Idemitsu’s Video Works from the 1970s–1980s,” 2024.
“Awaken the Maternal Spirit Within All Humans: Tabita Rezaire,” Kimdaljin Art Research Institute, December 26, 2024.
“Amol K Patil: Who Is Invited to the City?,” Kimdaljin Art Research Institute, November 25, 2024.
“Gaëlle Choisne: Love That Softly Embraces You (Me),” Kimdaljin Art Research Institute, November 6, 2024.
“Anywhere Beyond the World: On the Layered Temporalities in No Ghost Just a Shell,” THISCOMESFROM, September 13, 2024.
“I Want to Reach to You: On the Accumulation and Dispersal of Transparent Memories of Jung Jaeyeol,” 2024.
Presentation
“Attack on Titan: What Do Humans Amidst the Cycles of Freedom, Violence, and Memory?,” Invited Talk, Sohyeonmun, Suwon, 2025
“At the Intersection of Gender Politics and Media Experiment: Mako Idemitsu’s Video Works from the 1970s–1980s,” ACC Archive Research Group Public Seminar, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 2024
Curatorial Projects
Dental Critic, Wreath and Towel, Seoul
Artist / Contributor (Participated as époche rete)
Supported by Wreath and Towel (Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture)
2025
A Smooth World and Its Troubles,
Tri-bowl, Incheon Curator (Co-curated with Eunchong Choi)
Supported by Incheon Foundation for Arts and Culture
2024
PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century,
The 15th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju
Main Exhibition Catalogue Editor, Exhibition Coordinator / Assistant Manager
2024
Burnt into Memories, Seeping into Your Eyes,
The 11th Amado Annualnale, Amado Art Space, SeoulSelected Curator (Selected with the artist Gippume Gwak)
Supported by Amado Art Space
2024
"Project Mirage: On the Language of Deviant Queer (Visual) Art Spaces,"
Space Mirage, Seoul
Research participant
Supported by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Artistic Research Grant
2023
rete, Art Space Seogyo, Seoul
Curator and Critic (Participated as Une critique de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard)
Supported by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Co-growth Art Experiment Support 'LINK'
2023
Intermissions Will Run for 37.5 Years, Space Mirage, Seoul
Curator
2023
Before the Wind, Suwon Museum of Art, Suwon (Co-organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)
Curatorial Assistant / Exhibition Coordinator
2021
Born, A Woman, Suwon Museum of Art, SuwonCuratorial Assistant / Exhibition Coordinator
2020
Fellowships, Grants, Honors & Awards
Arts Council Korea
ARKO Critic LAB Fellowship, Selected Critic
3,500,000 KRW
2025
Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Seoul
RC (Review Critic) Project Fellowship,
Selected Critic
Grant Amount TBD
2025
Asia Culture Center, Gwangju
ACC Archive Research Group Fellowship,
Selected Researcher (Participated as Dysmorphia)
2024
Amado Art Space, Seoul
The 11th Amado Annualnale Grant,
Selected Curator
2,000,000 KRW
2024
Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul
*c-lab 7.0 Fellowship,
Research fellow (Lab-mate)
2023
Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Seoul
Co-growth Art Experiment Support 'LINK' Grant, Art Space Seogyo
1,600,000 KRW
2023
Kyujanggak International Center for Korean Studies, Seoul National University
The 17th Kyujanggak Korean Studies Summer Workshop Grant
2023
The 2nd Art Data Changes the World Challenge Contest
Excellence Prize
Commendation by the President of the Korean Culture & Arts Centers Association (KoCACA)
1,000,000 KRW
2021
The 8th Cultural Data Utilization Contest
Grand Prize, Ideas Category
Commendation by the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Republic of Korea
3,000,000 KRW
2020
Scholarship
Professor Oh Jin-Kyeong Endowed ScholarshipDepartment of History of Art,
Ewha Womans University
2,000,000 KRW
Fall 2022
Teaching Assistant Scholarship“Women and Art” (Prof. Eunju Kang)
Ewha Womans University
2,000,000 KRW
Fall 2022
Administrative Assistant ScholarshipCenter for Future Innovation,
Ewha Womans University
12,000,000 KRW
Fall 2021 – Spring 2022, Spring 2023
Hongik ScholarshipHongik University
11,834,500 KRW
2015–2018
Language Proficiency
Korean(Native), English(Fluent), Japanese(Intermediate), French(Beginner)
Last Updated Sep 22, 2025
BACK
A Smooth World and Its Troubles
October 1 ⏤ 20, 2024
Tri-bowl, Incheon
Co-curated with Eunchong Choi
Artists: Jaewon Kang, Kim Sangdon, Soyoung Chung
Exhibition Graphic & Editorial Design: yfactorial
Selected exhibition for 2024 TRIBOWL CHOICE
Supported by Incheon Free Economic Zone, Incheon Foundation for Art and Culture, Art Space Tri-Bowl
* The exhibition title draws inspiration from a novel by Hanna Ren (伴名練).
Curatorial Statement
Incheon’s New Town Songdo, a metropolitan hub of South Korea’s midwestern coastline, is a cityscape of gleaming glass facades and neatly intersecting roads, presenting a surreal, almost flawless vision of the future. Time here feels suspended in a state of perpetual future; the past seems hazy and the future meticulously orchestrated, as though already laid out. Is this the future once dreamed of? While unfamiliar visitors lift their gaze to chase the skylines of towering skyscrapers, underfoot lies a weighty amalgamation of nature’s remnants and the heft of capital, submerged within the land reclaimed from the sea. Delving deep into the smooth borders of flowing capital, the past and present coalesce and drift together. From the city’s flawless horizon, the buried histories of the land and sea surface slowly like buoys. Beneath the calm, mirror-like surface of the city, navigation through the coordinates of time and space resembles the precarious balance of buoys bobbing on a windless sea.
Entangled within urban and ecological landscapes, Songdo reveals the complex identity shaped by the intensification of capitalism. Songdo’s tidal flats and waters have been abundant sources of marine life. During the Japanese colonial period, the area transformed into a tourist destination through land reclamation efforts, and after liberation, it became an industrial zone and landfill site. Today, the newly reclaimed land along Incheon’s coastline has evolved into Songdo, an international business hub and smart city, a center for cutting-edge industries. While inheriting and expanding Incheon’s historical role as a vital maritime trade route, Songdo has become a key node in global capitalism, extending its reach from the port of Incheon to the world via Incheon International Airport.
Yet as capital flows and concentrates, cities grow in an endless cycle of absorption, transforming urban and ecological landscapes into intertwined, coexisting new forms. In this process, nature is constantly consumed and reshaped, while capital meticulously smooths its surface. A forest of buildings now stands where countless marine species once thrived, their habitats buried under reclaimed land. Waste, the city’s surplus and unwanted byproduct, is hidden beneath its pristine exterior, funneled into an underground network of automatic refuse collection systems. Within this coexistence of smooth surfaces and rough undersides, the trajectories of South Korea’s deepening capitalism are traced. In the face of the climate crisis, Songdo’s layers of history raise profound questions about urban capital, ecology, and the visible and invisible workings of capitalism, propelling inquiries about the future ahead.
If smoothness, devoid of friction and obstruction, is the essence of capitalism, then Songdo’s sea, built on the bedrock of capital, is more a placid surface than a deep and fearsome abyss. Just as no one envisions a storm-tossed ocean when booking an expensive hotel with an ocean view, or as awe toward romanticized nature peaks once humanity gains control over it, the sea’s turbulent nature is tamed and consumed, its roughness smoothed over. Yet beneath this windless surface, unseen movements continue, ever-present. It is there that the buoy becomes visible.
A sudden protrusion on the perfect surface of the sea, the buoy is a seam left unrepaired. Embodying both tension and release, it breaks the sea’s stillness and communicates something deeper. Though precariously suspended above the depths, the buoy persists, ever visible even in the calmest waters, and it remains ready to reemerge in the fiercest of storms. As an artistic metaphor, A Smooth World and Its Troubles presents three buoys disrupting capitalism’s glassy sea. The works of Soyoung Chung, Jaewon Kang, and Kim Sangdon rise like buoys from beneath the waters, creating ripples that call forth landscapes before, during, and after capitalism’s smooth world.
Soyoung Chung has long focused on the collision and overlap between the fast-moving time of the city and the slow, gradual time of nature, observing how the two interact and transform life and objects, such as fishing gear washed ashore or buoys encrusted with barnacles. Through these interactions, Chung senses the layered time of this world from the perspective of a human observer. Jaewon Kang embraces the fluidity of the smooth world, offering sculptures that reflect the polished, grand visions of a future shaped by capital, yet these works, crafted from reflective materials, also shed their sleek exterior within the virtual space of the screen, revealing their essence. Kim Sangdon’s works, in contrast, are charged with vivid yet empty symbols—an ornamented shopping cart, a sail crowded with words—capturing the saturation and hollowness of capitalism in secular yet archetypal imagery. His sailboat, standing on capital and casting itself into the sea with the sky overhead, navigates a new course in the chaos of material society, cutting through the desires that shape it.
Songdo, like the sea, swells and expands, absorbing its troubles as it grows with the flow of capital. These troubles, surfacing like buoys from the depths, lead toward the deep fissures of this world, where many seams and gaps beneath capital’s smooth surface are discovered. Despite capitalism’s relentless pursuit of a seamless future, continually glossing over imperfections, the landscape ahead remains complex and jagged, confronting a future far from smooth. The buoys of Songdo continually rise—not mere signals of warning, but reminders of the city’s hidden troubles and the natural forces lying dormant beneath the surface, evoking lost times long forgotten. These buoys are signs of the future, guiding a journey below the surface toward the possibilities that lie beyond capitalism’s polished world.
Songdo’s smooth surface and its underside are not confined to this city alone. The city is a microcosm of the smooth world, shaped by capital’s steady stream, where nature’s memory and human-made fractures still breathe beneath its polished exterior. The task at hand is not to carve out a smooth future for a smooth world, but to imagine a rough-edged future, brimming with the troubles complicated and uncertain yet to unfold.
Written by Yaerin Park, Eunchong Choi
Installation view
Photo ⓒ Juhwan Lee