[Interview] Beyond Boundaries: An Interview with Dohee Park

London-based artist Dohee Park defies traditional definitions. Trained in set and performance design, she now works across sculpture, installation, video, and live performance, creating multidimensional works that blur the lines between mediums, spaces, and emotions. We sat down with her to discuss her evolving practice, inspirations, and vision for the future.

“I Don’t Want to Be Defined as Just One Thing”

“I started in set design because I loved cinema and wanted to work with mise-en-scène,” she recalls. “Working with directors taught me a lot, but it also sparked my desire to explore abstraction and create work drawn directly from my own narratives.”

This shift led her to experiment across multiple mediums — from sculptural forms to video installations and live performances. Her recent series, including Territory of the Unsaid and Carving Air (a collaboration with movement artist Donna Kim), explores the intersection of emotions, memory, and space. A recurring theme in her practice is storytelling through process. For the Carving Air project, she and Donna Kim, began by exploring how breath can shape space:

“We started by interviewing each other. Donna has always worked with breath, and I was thinking about emotions tied to territory. We wanted to see how breath could transform space. From sketches to movements to sculptures, each step informed the next.”

Carving air (2024)  with Donna Kim, plaster and nature resources on polystyrene 110 x 110 x 110 cm

For her short film When Waves Walk, she revisited family memories of seaside trips — only to  realise those memories were constructed through others’ retellings. “I became fascinated by the distortions of memory,” she explains. 

“I imagined the sea as a witness to everything — holding our laughter, our objects, our emotions — and responding through sculptures shaped by fragments of waves and erosion.”

This layered process — research, conversation, movement, material exploration — is central to her approach. “I want audiences to see not just the finished piece, but the journey,” she says.

When Waves Walk (2023), A Film by Dohee Park, Hyunjung Cha, Harry Symington

Currently, she is drawn to plaster for its duality: “It’s solid, but also fragile. You can cast it, carve it, break it — it mirrors how memories and emotions can feel both enduring and delicate.”

In a recent work, she experimented with green tea as a natural dye:

“I wanted a colour that feels like it seeps organically into the material, like how emotions seep into us. Depending on the concentration, the colour spreads differently — some areas stay pale, others deepen. It reflects how people experience the same moment with varying emotional intensities.”

Territory of the Unsaid (2025) , 115 x 65 x 45 cm plaster, Asian paper and Green tea

Dohee’s work is the kind that invites you to read and understand the process as much as the final form. It’s not just about how the work looks; the stories behind it, the journeys of thought, and the careful processes that shape each piece carry deeper meaning. What makes her practice particularly compelling is how meticulously she connects ideas — weaving together tangible materials and intangible concepts into a cohesive narrative. From the very beginning to the final outcome, her thought process is deliberate and curated, pushing beyond boundaries to bring multiple layers of meaning into dialogue.

Collaboration, Cultural Identity, and Expanding Possibilities

For the artist, collaboration has transformed from something intimidating into something deeply liberating:

“I used to worry that collaborating would make the work less mine. But I’ve realised that when people bring their strengths together, the work grows beyond what I could do alone.”

This openness fuels her ambition to create large-scale installations that invite audiences not just to view but to move through and inhabit the work. Inspired by outdoor exhibitions like Frieze Sculpture, she imagines environments where natural light, shadows, and organic materials interact to create immersive, ever-changing experiences.

At the same time, her practice is rooted in her own cultural identity — shaped by growing up in Korea and working in London. She often draws on Eastern philosophies, particularly the concept of 여백 (yeobaek), or “empty space.”

“In English, ‘empty space’ sounds negative, but in Eastern philosophy, it’s generative — a place where new possibilities emerge. I want to bring that sensibility into spatial installations, showing how absence can hold meaning.”

In one project, she explored territorial dynamics through a three-dimensional chessboard, where black and white tiles physically shift — expanding and contracting spaces to reflect power, tension, and balance. Currently, she is preparing a collaborative series with a ballet-trained artist, focusing on movement through the feet and tracing how bodily gestures connect to memory and emotion.

Her practice resists neat categorisation. Sculptor, director, storyteller — her work exists in the spaces between disciplines and definitions. She smiles:

“I don’t want to be boxed in. My identity is in the fluidity — in the process of crossing boundaries and finding new ways to translate emotions into space.”

Dohee’s work invites us to slow down and feel — to experience memory, territory, and identity not as fixed ideas but as living, shifting phenomena. Through her blend of mediums and collaborative spirit, she challenges conventional boundaries and reminds us that art can exist in the spaces between definitions.

Written by Dr GeeSun Hahn

4482 SASAPARI Lead Curator

Fourth Chamber Projects Director

University of Leicester, Museum Studies, UK

Photo © Dohee Park