Sora Park (b. 1992) works with a focus on social issues that emerge within contemporary digital media environments such as social media spaces and the metaverse. In particular, she pays attention to phenomena intensified and exposed by the advancement of science and technology, imagining possible situations, characters, and products that could arise in a future where today’s problems have further deepened. She visualizes these ideas through a variety of mediums, including sculpture, video, and installation.

Sora Park’s work begins with observing how society and technology influence and transform one another. In particular, she focuses on how digital technology shapes modes of communication and the ways in which technology intervenes in human thought within algorithm-driven social media environments.
 
She has also continuously explored how individuals project themselves as images in social media spaces, and how these images, in turn, affect their perception of self.

For example, her 2021 work Item Inventory begins with an exploration of the relationship between a player’s self and body, and the virtual existence of a character within a game environment. Park observed that, because the player directly controls an avatar in the virtual world, a game character can be regarded as an extension of the user’s self or body. 

Furthermore, she noted that the clothing and items of online game characters, which enhance their body enhancement or grant special abilities, share similarities with the functions of wearable devices in the real world.

In response, Park created a ceramic sculpture series by combining visual digital elements such as game character costumes, in-game items, and gaming devices. She then arranged these works in the gallery space as if they were part of an online game’s item inventory, aiming to evoke a distinctive and uncanny atmosphere. 

By recreating visual elements found in networked digital spaces through ceramics, her work blends digital aesthetics with the familiar qualities of traditional craftsmanship. This fusion offers viewers an opportunity to reflect on humanity’s long-standing creativity and productivity.

Her exploration of the connection between game character clothing items and contemporary wearable devices continued in her 2021 solo exhibition 《Connect-Disconnect-Reconnect》 at the Daegu Arts Center.  

Park focused on the phenomenon of digital media extending our bodies and minds from physical space into the digital realm. Using the aesthetic qualities of wearable devices alongside the conceptual aspects of personal digital gadgets, she envisioned possible technologies of the future.

In this project, the artist imagined a fictional wearable headgear designed to train emotions and developed its product design. The concept was then realized as a sculptural prototype using 3D modeling and printing technologies. 

Connect-Disconnect-Reconnect (2021) employs the language of science fiction to depict a contemporary reality in which the human body and emotions are continually subject to development. It reflects on how, in today’s culture of self-improvement, positive emotions are often treated as resources to be cultivated for the sake of individual productivity and achievement.

In this way, her conceptual approach begins with a critical perspective on the social issues that arise in tandem with today’s scientific and technological developments, and then extends to imagining how these realities might intensify in the future. Through such speculation, the artist envisions specific “products” that might emerge in these future scenarios and visualizes them in the form of “models.” 

Alternatively, she imagines various episodes that could unfold in the future if the problems we currently face were to worsen, developing these scenarios into narratives by writing them herself. This process can evolve into video or installation works alongside sculptural models, with the two methods applied either independently or combined within a single work.

For example, the 2022 work Soft Touch is set in a future moment where the advancement of network technology has accelerated. This project unfolds under the premise that a fictional wearable designer named “Dr. Sara Park” designs an imaginary wearable device for “James Kim,” a virtual human influencer who lives and works within a digital game world, presenting its prototype as a sculptural work. 

Through its futuristic imagination of virtual space and its inquiry into clothing and human appearance within the digital realm, the work reflects contemporary social and cultural conditions while envisioning a future scenario that may yet come to pass.

The work, composed of fictional short dialogues and centered around an imaginary wearable device, reflects contemporary social phenomena and issues—such as the obsession with the ‘perfect body,’ economic inequality expressed through paid services, and the fast-paced consumption of modern digital communication—by reframing them through the language of science fiction set in a future perspective.

In other words, Soft Touch creates personas for its fictional protagonists and brings the imagined story into physical space through text, video, and sculptural models. This science fiction narrative further expands in the 2024 3D video work Meta Beauty Innovation. 

The video unfolds around the fictional characters ‘Dr. Sara’ and ‘Kim James’ from Soft Touch, who establish a virtual beauty device company and launch their developed products along with premium services.

The video, presented in the format of a product launch event, features the fictional IT company ‘Meta Beauty Innovation’ introducing their innovative beauty solution, ‘I-Meta,’ designed for future digital humans. The company explains the device’s features, functions, usage environments, and target users. Meanwhile, viewers at the exhibition can experience the new product firsthand by trying it on virtually using Instagram face filters.

Through this work, Sora Park explores how traditional concepts of appearance and the body might change with advances in digital image processing technology and metaverse environments. Starting from the idea of a virtual body in which appearance can be freely altered with a single click—like today’s beauty filters on social media—she imagines the future of digital humans.
 
In this future virtual world, aging and death do not exist, and there are no limits to changing or redesigning one’s innate physical form. As a result, obsessions with appearance or physical flaws disappear, giving rise to new forms of desire and value. 

Her work invites us to imagine what new desires and products might emerge in future societies shaped by the interaction between social values and technology. Through futuristic thinking, it blurs the boundaries between digital and reality, offering immersive experiences.

In a similar vein, the project NeoTex Depot (2023) was inspired by a storage facility for wearable devices used by digital humans living in a futuristic digital space. It envisions the wearable beauty device I-Meta for future virtual humans and recreates it in the form of sculptural models. Realistic skin textures, resembling human flesh, are also incorporated into the sculptures and installed together within the exhibition space.

Sora Park presented this project in a public restroom, a space that is both highly private and public in nature. She explained that since such spaces are used for people to check their own appearances in public, they share spatial similarities with social media, which inspired her to incorporate this idea as part of the work. 

Therefore, the project explores the boundaries between present and future, virtual and real, and public and private spaces through the combination of the imagined device prototype, the public restroom setting, and Instagram filters.

At the same time, Sora Park has focused on the changing bodily experiences that occur as one moves between physical and digital spaces, creating participatory installation works that use the viewer’s body as a medium to reproduce the sensory gap felt at the boundary between the two worlds. 

Her ongoing project since 2022, City Fence, is an installation designed so that viewers can freely change its position and shape. It physically realizes an interface that functions as a fence in the virtual world, bringing it into physical space.

Just as fences in the physical world serve as boundaries that partition urban spaces, interfaces in the digital realm act as boundaries that divide and segment digital spaces. We experience these two different dimensions not only in distinct ways but also perceive the differences when moving from one space to another. In particular, as we navigate between these spaces, our bodies encounter new emotions and sensations that were previously unknown. 

The artwork locates the body—which had been experienced as data through digitalization—back into the physical world, thus restoring the body as a measure of space. Within the interface space reproduced as tangible objects, viewers once again move these objects using their bodies as the medium.

However, unlike in virtual spaces, the human body inevitably returns as an unstable entity subject to physical factors such as space, gravity, and speed. Beyond these physical influences, viewers are also inevitably affected by the shapes created and left behind by previous viewers—that is, by the objects themselves.
 
This work, which unfolds through the mutual interaction between the digital interface transformed into physical objects and the human body, offers an experience where the datafied body is placed back into the physical world, allowing bodily sensations to be newly reactivated as a measure of space. 

Sora Park’s work prompts us to reconsider our bodies, minds, and daily lives as they change alongside advances in science and technology. By imagining a future in which these changes and their resulting challenges deepen, her work questions how we should redefine the boundaries between reality and the virtual world that surround us.

 “I wanted to highlight that in digital media environments, especially social media spaces, our bodies and daily lives are being capitalized on and commodified as images, which are then consumed. The explosive development of digital image processing technologies and the overwhelming abundance of images greatly influence the ways we distribute and consume images.”        (Sora Park, from the BE(ATTITUDE) interview)

Sora Park studied painting at Dongguk University and Seoul National University before earning her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her solo exhibitions include 《Meta Beauty Innovation》 (Daegu Arts Center, Daegu, 2024), 《Dark Closet》 (Keep-in-Touch, Seoul, 2022), 《Soft Prologue》 (523 Kunst Doc, Busan, 2022), 《Item Inventory》 (Suseong Artpia, Daegu, 2021), among others.
 
Park has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《What Things Dream About》 (MMCA, Seoul, 2024), 《Through You》 (PS Center, Seoul, 2024), the 7th  Changwon Sculpture Biennale Prologue 《Speaking About the Future: Shape, Map, Tree》 (Seongsan Art Hall, Changwon, 2023), 《Summer Exhibition》 (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2022), 《Data Jungwon》 (Kim Hee Soo Art Center, Seoul, 2022), 《New Contemporaries 2021》 (Firstsite, Colchester, 2021), and 《London Grads Now》 (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2020).
 
Sora Park was selected as one of the ‘Young Artists of the Year’ at Daegu Arts Center in 2024 and was also chosen for the UK’s ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021’. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in 2025. 

References

• 박소라, Sora Park (Artist Website)
• 비애티튜드, 완벽한 아이디어는 없다
• 서울문화재단, [예술인 아카이브] 박소라_시각예술/조각 미디어 설치
• 매일신문, 대구예술발전소 9~12월 '2021 수창동 스핀오프'전, 2021.08.31
• 대구문화예술회관, [전시 소개] Meta Beauty Innovation (Daegu Arts Center, [Exhibition Overview] Meta Beauty Innovation)
• 국립현대미술관, [작품 소개] 사물은 어떤 꿈을 꾸는가 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), [Artwork Description] What Things Dream About)