Kwanwoo Park (b. 1990) approaches the human being as a “phenomenon,” addressing in his practice issues such as consciousness and self-consciousness through perception, the tension between reality and fiction as mediated by “belief,” as well as questions of migration and identity.
 
The artist experiments with liminal space-time beyond conventional categories by creating devices to capture phenomena, staging scenes that evoke a microscopic sense of perception, orchestrating collective situations in which the boundary between subject and object dissolves, or designing singular experiences that can exist only through testimony.

Kwanwoo Park’s practice begins with the view that the ways we define others or ourselves—and, on that basis, judge or understand the world—should not be regarded as fixed outcomes, but rather as phenomena that are continuously generated and in flux.
 
In his artist’s notes, he defines “truth” as “the belief we construct about it,” and remarks, “I believe in life as a living theater, and I am interested in the multiple, overlapping truths created when they collide.”

To capture the various phenomena that constitute our world, Kwanwoo Park has devised a range of devices. He describes these as “devices superimposed onto life.” These devices are created to blur what appears clear, to crack what seems intact, and to generate errors.

In Park’s early works, such devices appeared in material form. For example, Tomorrow (2014), Stranger (2017), and the series ‘Tell Me That I’m Here’ (2019) introduced device-structures that, by guiding the act of “looking” through vision, created unexpected ruptures in perception and provoked questions about one’s own sight, awareness, and relation to the Other.
 
Tomorrow, a mirror-shaped screen, confronted viewers not with their own reflection but with the gaze of someone who had stood in the same spot 24 hours earlier. Stranger, a structure in the form of a periscope made of aluminum, forced viewers, at the moment of peering into one end of the device, to encounter the back of their own heads.

Furthermore, Tell Me That I’m Here 2 staged a situation in which two performers, standing on a narrow bridge, approached one another while wearing virtual reality headsets. Each headset was equipped with a 180-degree VR camera that relayed the situation to the other’s device, thereby exchanging their fields of vision.
 
Through this apparatus—one that compelled each performer to gaze at themselves via the eyes of the other—they came to recognize themselves through the Other, ultimately colliding physically to resolve the visual dissonance.
 
This series of works twists the structure by which the “external” is perceived according to the gaze of the “self,” thereby generating perceptual errors. In doing so, Park’s devices blur the boundaries between self and Other, prompting viewers to question their own sight, perception, and understanding.

Alongside this, in his ongoing series ‘Human Conversation’ (2018–), Kwanwoo Park employs an AI chatbot as a mediator to question the identity and boundaries of a future humanity augmented by technological development, while also probing the conditions that constitute the essence of our existence.
 
‘Human Conversation’ unfolds by interweaving sentences generated by humans with those produced by the AI chatbot, deliberately blurring the line between the two. For instance, in the first work of the series, two actors are seen conversing on stage, yet most of their dialogue consists not of human-authored lines, but of sentences written by the AI chatbot.
 
At this moment, the artist intervenes in the conversation, creating a situation in which it becomes impossible to discern which parts belong to the human and which do not.

In his more recent work, Park has experimented with blending the improvised responses of humans and AI, based on a questionnaire that links the identity of the speaker to issues requiring concrete imagination—such as sensation, memory, emotion, belief, and worldview.
 
The individuals appearing in the video are placed in improvisational situations where they must use their imagination to create a hypothetical identity, ranging from simple attributes like names, gender, and physical characteristics to complex episodic memories. Through this process, six identities - Melinda, Maxine, Solomon Marconi, Max, The One Who Moves with the Wind, and René - possess the bodies of two figures appearing on screen.
 
As the monologues of these six characters overlap, each screen plays mono frequencies with a 5Hz difference; combined, these frequencies create theta waves, known to form in the brain during dream states.

Kwanwoo Park, who has devised devices as a way to crack the structures of truth that surround us and to capture phenomena that traverse different dimensions of understanding, gradually began to evolve these devices into immaterial forms such as performances, happenings, and events.
 
For example, in Do Androids Feel Like Dancing? (2019), the artist intermingled around thirty performers—assumed to be androids, artificial beings indistinguishable from humans in appearance—with the audience, creating a situation that disrupted ordinary perception.

Park placed the performers, who were to assume the role of androids, within the exhibition space without informing them of each other’s presence. They then joined a gallery in which a video of a naked man dancing in a trance looped continuously, beginning to dance in sync with the music.
 
Rather than giving them specific choreography, the performers were assigned two tasks: to gradually dance with increasing intensity to the streaming music, and, upon receiving a signal five minutes before the music ended, to remain frozen like statues for five minutes before leaving the space naturally.

The performers, dancing freely, encouraged audience participation and blended into the atmosphere, leaving both themselves and the spectators unsure who was performing as an android and who was simply observing. However, after about an hour, the audience encountered the performers suddenly frozen, as if revealing themselves to be machines, creating a moment of perceptual dissonance.
 
Through this situation, which elicits such a sense of estrangement, viewers are prompted to question the current situation, the relationships within it, and their own position in that context.

In this way, Park’s work, which places the audience in a carefully constructed situation, took shape in the 2021 solo exhibition 《A Dance with a Wolf》 at Platform-L, where events unfolded on the level of the individual viewer. The exhibition allowed only one visitor at a time, each given a fixed duration of ten minutes. Visitors removed their shoes and entered the building’s elevator, where they received instructions for the experience.
 
The only prior information provided to the visitor was: “Take off your shoes and enter, proceed to the Machine Room on B3, put on the headset placed in front of you once the door opens and walk into the space. When the music stops and the lights go completely dark, return via the elevator.”

As the elevator doors opened, visitors were greeted by a meadow scattered with fallen leaves and imbued with the deep scent of grass. The walls and ceiling of the space revealed an industrial aesthetic, composed of concrete and steel structures, while a large empty screen was installed at the front.
 
Upon entering, a yellow light gradually filled the room, slowly fading out over the course of ten minutes. Visitors placed the headset on their heads from the pedestal in front of the elevator and walked into the space. Inside, they encountered an “interpreter” — a figure who outwardly appeared to be an ordinary visitor, wearing a headset and listening to something — and shared the spatiotemporal experience with them for ten minutes.

The interpreter, noticing a visitor observing them, circles around and attempts something as if to dance together. At this moment, the visitor may choose to respond, ignore, or entirely observe the situation from the outside. The content of the work unfolds through the emotional fluctuations experienced within these relational encounters with another.
 
The structure of the work, as determined by the artist, is only partially revealed to both the visitor and the interpreter. The coexistence of visitor and interpreter within the work cannot be directly observed, and all forms of archiving—including photography or video—are strictly prohibited during the experience. The work exists solely as a personal experience and memory shared between the visitor and the interpreter.
 
All textual materials related to the exhibition are provided to the visitor upon exiting, allowing them to read about the events that have already occurred, tracing the experience retrospectively through the given clues.

Following this, Kwanwoo Park began experimenting with structures in which chain reactions of situations unfold through collective psychodramas. A representative work in this approach, Club Reality (2022), is clearly a play, yet it unfolds in a slightly strange situation where no one can tell what is part of the play and what is not.
 
This work took place as a kind of secret gathering in a museum, where 11 people met regularly over 11 weeks. It unfolded like a reality show or a series of staged scenarios. The most crucial premise that governs the work’s worldview is that everything said there is a lie. Every statement and every setup is created based on this premise, which suspends any ultimate judgment about one another.

The 11 beta testers (participants) concealed their true identities and took on alternate personas of their own design to participate in the gathering. All members of the group agreed to believe in one another’s assumed existences and went through weekly pre-planned episodes. Over the course of 11 weeks, each day they wrote diaries from the perspective of the fictional persona they had created. These diaries were later compiled in the form of “testimonies,” serving as crucial evidence that the events had, in a sense, actually taken place.

For the first ten weeks, the gatherings were held privately. In the eleventh and final week, however, the space transformed into an exhibition—featuring hundreds of photographs documenting the preceding ten weeks of activity—and a party filled with jazz music. Visitors entering the exhibition were asked, via prior reservation, to provide their names and personal details, which were used to create name tags.
 
Upon arrival, each visitor was required to wear someone else’s name tag. At the culminating event, they assumed the identity of that name tag and joined the party. Within this scenario, there was always someone else assuming each name tag’s identity—yet no one could ever know the true owner of any given name tag.
 
Through this series of situations, individuals experienced the blurring of their personal boundaries of “identity.” From this, layered realities were continuously generated, allowing the line between fiction and truth to remain fluid and unsettled.

Rather than representing human modes of being and self-consciousness through specific images or messages, Kwanwoo Park has set conditions for their emergence, presenting a range of experiments that unfold as exclusive experiences for each individual viewer.
 
Through these works, he creates ruptures in existing perceptual frameworks and senses surrounding the “self,” prompting questions about the relationships between oneself, others, and the world.

 "My art is devices superimposed on life. They are made to blur the obvious, to crack the intact, and to create mistakes. My work is concerned with the conditions for creating events and testifies to the situations, scenes, and events that combinations of conditions create. These are pseudo-devices for strange functions. This is a self-generating scene, a structure. This is a collective psychodrama."    (Kwanwoo Park, Artist’s Note) 

Kwanwoo Park studied Digital Media Design at Hongik University before pursuing Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, UK. His solo exhibitions include 《Witnesses and Testimonies》 (Culture Salon 5120, Seoul, 2023), 《Strange Dream/Gold Cases》 (The Reference, Seoul, 2023), 《Club Reality》 (Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《A Dance with a Wolf》 (Platform-L Contemporary Art Center, Seoul, 2021), and more.
 
He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Create Together, Change Tomorrow》 (Hangram Design Museum, Seoul, 2025), 《No-Reply》 (Art Center Art Moment, Seoul, 2024), 《Skin, The Deepest Part》 (Sehwa Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Voices from the Walls》 (Art Space Hohwa, Seoul, 2023), 《2022 ZER01NE DAY》 (S-Factory, Seoul, 2022), 《Turing Test: An AI's Love Confession》 (Seoul National University Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), and 《2021 ZER01NE DAY》 (Wonhyoro Hyundai Motors Service Center, Seoul, 2021).
 
Park was selected as an artist-in-residence at the Hoban Cultural Foundation H-Art Lab (2022–2023) and the MMCA Goyang Residency (2021). He has also served as lead artist for Hyundai Motor Group’s ZER01NE Z-Lab (2020) and participated as a ZER01NE Creator (2019).

References

• 박관우, Kwanwoo Park (Artist Website)
• 퍼블릭아트, 허대찬 – 박관우: 균형이 깨진 시스템. 지각게임의 제안자
• 플랫폼엘, [전시 소개] PLAP 2021 l 늑대와 함께 춤을 (Platform-L, [Exhibition Overview] PLAP 2021 l A Dance with a Wolf)
• 더레퍼런스, [전시 소개] 이상한 꿈 / 미제사건 (The Reference, [Exhibition Overview] Strange Dream/Gold Cases)
• 호반문화재단, 박관우 (Hoban Cultural Foundation, Kwanwoo Park)