Yoonshin Park: Prompt and Prompted

Most of us think of books as familiar. In fact, our familiarity with these objects shapes our expectations of them–what we imagine their size, material, or content to be. For Yoonshin Park, artist books offer an opportunity to leave behind those expectations and model new possibilities for how we might structure, find meaning, and experience books. For more than two decades, Park has engaged artist books as an experimental form and conceptual space where she can expand our imagination of what an artist book can be. This exhibition presents new and ongoing works by Park that further her exploration of artist books as spatial, symbolic, and participatory sites capable of engaging notions of memory, marginality, translation, and transformation. For Park, the freedom that the medium affords is an invitation to explore alternative ways of being in other aspects of her life. What if possibilities for how we live our lives could be as expansive as Park's definition of an artist book? Since 2019, Park has been teaching courses on artist books virtually through Hyde Park Art Center's Oakman Clinton School + Studios and has found her practice of teaching to be as generative for her as it is for her students. The title of the exhibition, Prompt and Prompted , refers to the reciprocal exchange that takes place in Park's classroom.