Preface

Park explores the notion of translation at the intersections of language, experience, and materiality. Rather than treating translation as the neutral transfer of meaning based on assumed equivalence between languages, she approaches it as a reconstruction of sensory experience through artistic practice. In particular, she continues to develop artistic attempts that revive sound-symbolic expressions—such as uiseongeo and uitaeeo in Korean (onomatopoeia and ideophones)—which are often reduced to explanatory terms in interlingual translation, by rendering them through gestural and embodied forms of depiction. This becomes a practice where art does not function as an abstraction of fixed concepts, but as a mode of resonant, repeated performance that reveals similarity and difference, enabling transfers between sensory modalities.

This approach also proposes a perspective on the notion of ui (擬, imitation), embedded in uiseongeo and uitaeeo—a concept tentatively framed here through the lens of iconicity. In Park’s work, imitation is not a faithful replication of form, but an act of evoking the affective density of an event or memory. Her videos, performances, and installations construct conditions for intersensory translation through repeated patterns of image, gesture, and sound. In this way, imitation becomes an artistic practice that reveals both resemblance and difference between original and translation, reconfiguring experience through interpretation.

Her installation 《Summersnowglobalism》(2022) begins with the impression of poplar fluff drifting like snow in summer, and reimagines it as a snow globe form reappropriated from everyday life, exploring narrative frameworks and sensory crossings between human and nonhuman agents. Poplar fluff, laden with residues of urban ecological transformation, functions as a sensory mediator through its light and irregular motion. Rather than treating it just as a poetic image, Park invokes the rhythmic floating of rice grains during the fermentation process of dongdongju (a traditional Korean wine), materializing the sound-image of the Korean mimetic word ‘dongdong.’ The installation-performance based on this proposes a new interface between language and sensation.

The glass sphere at the center of the piece alludes to a conventional snow globe, while visualizing the actual biological movements of fermentation inside. Rather than serving as a commemorative object representing a miniature world, a still life, it becomes a sensory field where vision and tactility overlap. The bubbles, flows, and temperature changes resist being reduced to visual cues, becoming tangible sensations in themselves. They are experienced as the material sensation of substance. Through this sensory interplay, Park dismantles the visual-centric object as a representational frame and suggests iconic translation as a generative mode of knowledge. Her work resonates with the potential of non-linear and non-dominant narratives as artistic methodologies, in line with concepts such as Sara Ahmed’s ‘queer use’ and Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory.’

Her experimental video 《Liquid Language: Etude of Gesture》(2024), rooted in performance, starts from the untranslatability of Korean sound-symbolism. Here, translation is approached not as a reduction of meaning, but as reenactment through imitation. The video begins with recordings of natural phenomena around the Spree River in Berlin, particularly the shimmering light on water (yoonseul in Korean). Park interprets yoonseul as an ever-shifting image formed by the reflection and refraction of the sun—an elemental image—through the fluid, reflective medium of water. Through this, she explores the asymmetrical relationship between original and translation as an operation of material imagination, following Gaston Bachelard’s notion.

The work further juxtaposes this yoonseul image with Benjamin West’s painting Narcissus and Echo, reexamining the irreconcilable gap between visual reflection (Narcissus) and auditory reverberation (Echo). In the video’s climax, each performer observes and interprets the image of yoonseul through movement and sound. These gestures generate audiovisual echoes through bodily acts of mimicry that read and rewrite a shared original. The work gives practical form to the concept of iconic translation—proposed in Park’s essay 《Iconic Translation: Korean Sound-Symbolism and Echoing Gesture》(2025)—as a method where pre-linguistic gestures reflect each other and generate rhythm.

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