Sunmin Park (Seoul, 1971) is a visual artist known for her poetic exploration of perception and the natural world. After training in biology, she graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in Sculpture and studied with Rosemarie Trockel at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she obtained the title of Meisterschülerin. Sunmin Park's artistic practice is placed in a space of oscillation between micro and macro, civilization and nature, presence and absence. Working both through the meticulous observation of microscopes and through the expansive vision of binoculars, her work ranges from photography, video, drawing, installation, publishing and writing, probing the invisible and tracing the relationships between perception internal and external reality. Today, her practice continues this poetic quest through visual means, exploring how nature transforms without narrative and how such gaps and irregularities can give rise to unexpected meanings and imaginative possibilities.
Her recent commissioned works include Song of the Swamp – Sound Drifting, an immersive and participatory soundscape exhibited at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea. Her works have been presented at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; at the Leeum Museum of Modern Art, Seoul; at the Nam June Paik Art Center; at the Seoul Museum of Art; and at the Goethe-Institut Seoul.
Internationally, she has exhibited at the MAO Museum of Oriental Art in Turin, the Art Pavilion in Zagreb, the Volvo Studio Milano and the Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival. She lives and works in Seoul.
The artist Sunmin Park presented the video installation Pale Pink Universe (2025), accompanied by a series of new drawings that investigate the relationship between nature and man, observed through agricultural and winemaking activities. The work developed on the occasion of the artistic residency promoted by Marchesi de’ Frescobaldi at the CastelGiocondo estate in Montalcino, as part of the VII edition of Artists for Frescobaldi.
Pink Pale Universe represents the outcome of a deep immersion of the artist in the Tuscan landscape, not only natural and agricultural, but also historical and cultural.
The images, accompanied by the composition of musician Bojan Vuletić, alternate visions of a microscopic and macroscopic dimension in motion, from the internal particles of a grape to the vegetation surrounding the vine.
The work takes inspiration from a sonnet by the poet Dino Frescobaldi (Florence, circa 1271 – 1316), an exponent of the medieval stil novo, which the artist Sunmin Prk herself recites as the narrator in the English translation of the text.
The video, together with the drawings entitled Pale Pink Universe-Bouquet Giocondo d 02, 03 and 04 – which have become part of the permanent collections at MAO - is exhibited in dialogue with the funerary artefacts of ancient China, with which it shares a fundamental symbolic value, proposing itself as a poetic commentary and contemporary expansion of such ritual practices.
