{"id":20978,"date":"2026-02-12T23:36:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T23:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/02\/12\/in-chicago-yoonshin-park-explores-the-boundaries-of-the-book\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T23:36:19","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T23:36:19","slug":"in-chicago-yoonshin-park-explores-the-boundaries-of-the-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/02\/12\/in-chicago-yoonshin-park-explores-the-boundaries-of-the-book\/","title":{"rendered":"In Chicago, Yoonshin Park Explores the Boundaries of the Book"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Park\u2019s work explores the boundaries of the book as both object and language, inviting viewers to \u201cread\u201d through form, texture and absence. Courtesy Hyde Park Art Center<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cSometimes stories can be delivered without saying words,\u201d artist Yoonshin Park<\/a> tells Observer. \u201cThey can be delivered through shapes, materials, colors\u2014a more direct way of delivering messages.\u201d Park\u2019s exhibit at the Hyde Park Arts Center in Chicago, \u201cPrompt and Prompted,\u201d pushes at the edges of what a book can be and how stories can be told through them. The first piece viewers see upon entering the exhibit is a long, thin sheaf of white paper tied in a loose knot, marked with black ink spots that evoke some mysterious alphabet. The piece, I can no longer see.\/Whose story remains?<\/i> from a series titled \u201cHow (Not To) Read,\u201d sets the tone for the rest of the exhibition, which twists and contorts itself around, near and away from the form of the book and the meaning of the content.<\/p>\n

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Another piece titled When pages move, the words wander\/Covered, concealed, yet still breathing<\/i> from the same series, is a cluster of loops of ink-marked paper hanging down the wall\u2014somewhat comical, somewhat sinister, like a cow that has come unspooled. Works from the \u201cTied\u201d series are rectangular wall-mounted collections of handmade paper, tied together, creating colored or shaded tactile sculptures that communicate through color, shading and texture rather than words.<\/p>\n

Another group of wall-mounted installations from 2025 blurs the line between bookshelf and book. Here, each giant \u201cbook,\u201d all covered with those same inky blots and scribbles, is festooned with shelves and niches on which more marked paper is folded and fanned out\u2014books within books, or non-books within non-books, depending on how closely you want to read. The most striking of these is Neither flat nor fixed<\/i>, an L-shape installation that towers up on the wall and then slides out onto the floor, like a bed with a giant headboard attached. Rolled-up paper spools, like canisters, rest on the flat plane of the \u201cbook,\u201d evoking scrolls of unreadable secrets.<\/p>\n

Park was born and raised in South Korea; she came to Chicago to study at Columbia College. Books, she says, speak from culture to culture and language to language. A book \u201cis where we could get information. Translation happens through books; it\u2019s a space to enter interchange.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Installation view: \u201cYoonshin Park: Prompt and Prompted\u201d at Hyde Park Art Center. Courtesy Hyde Park Art Center<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the exhibition, that interchange is both open and somewhat opaque\u2014promising and withholding at once. Park\u2019s \u201cAgainst the Grain\u201d series consists of booklets screwed to the wall of the gallery, where they hang in a random pattern. They suggest informational pamphlets or brochures pinned on bulletin boards at a school, travel center or other communal venue, but look more closely, and they\u2019re blank. The only content is that which you imagined might be in them, like books in a language you can\u2019t read.<\/p>\n

A book always implies a writer, a reader and the meaning shared between them, and Park\u2019s show builds on and plays with this relationship. By enlarging and scrambling what a book can be, she addresses meaning and communication. And sometimes, she invites other people to create books with her.<\/p>\n

One room of the exhibition is devoted to works created by Park\u2019s students; another is devoted to works Park created in response to prompts from her students. Both are filled with a bewildering, delightful array of variations on what books can be, inspired by words and phrases translated into objects in odd and unexpected ways.<\/p>\n

Priya Deb<\/a>\u2019s To be held\/not held<\/i> looks like a toilet paper spool made of rough black cotton pulp paper\u2014its texture both enticing and ominous. Virginia Van Vynckt<\/a>\u2019s If a Tree Falls<\/i> is a series of marbled copper invitation cards with elliptical cursive messages such as \u201cplease return\/may all return.\u201d<\/p>\n

Park\u2019s work in this section is mostly responses to one-word prompts, and while the pieces are less monumental than those in the rest of the gallery, they still challenge ideas of what a book can be or say. One inspired by the word \u2018escape\u2019 looks like a collection of sheets of silvery plastic bound together; the leaves have pieces of paper stuck to them that say, \u201cplease push\u201d\u2026 \u201cPLEASE FLATTEN\u201d\u2026 \u201cI need to be flat.\u201d Is the book itself asking for help? Is the suggestion that someone is stuck inside it? The line between book and reader and writer is literally flattened; you\u2014or someone\u2014is trapped in what you read.<\/p>\n

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In Park\u2019s latest show, viewers encounter a range of conceptual books that shift between sculpture and text, readability and obscurity. Courtesy Hyde Park Art Center<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A piece based on the prompt \u2018weaving\u2019 is an open book, hollowed out like a trick tome that might contain liquor. But this book doesn\u2019t hold alcohol; instead, spilling from the hollow section is a pile of strands or spools clipped from a text. It looks like the book has coughed its guts out. Weaving ideas together, or unweaving them, can be messy.<\/p>\n

Park wanted to include student work in the show \u201cto promote the beauty of artist books with a larger crowd.\u201d Bookmaking, she says, \u201chas so many possibilities, and it generates ideas so easily, because it is already a kind of hybrid format.\u201d She added that she wanted to take the conversation about what books are and what they can be from inside the classroom into a more public space.<\/p>\n

Part of the joy of reading and of the world of books is the way you can follow people talking to each other and thinking with and against each other across time, across cultures and across borders. There are books about everything, from weaving to escaping to teaching art to learning another language. You read and absorb ideas, and then those ideas emerge in other forms and other places.<\/p>\n

Park\u2019s books, in that sense, are true books not despite their errant forms, but because they take the idea of the book somewhere else. Similarly, Park includes the work of her students in her show because her own practice is, like a book, intersubjective\u2014her art is the art she inspires others to make, and the prompts from others that inspire her. For her, the best books are about making new books together\u2014the bigger and more oddly shaped, the better.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/b>Yoonshin Park: Prompt and Prompted<\/b><\/a>\u201d is at Hyde Park Art Center through May 10, 2026.<\/b><\/p>\n

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Park uses erasure, abstraction and physical manipulation of paper and marks to interrogate how knowledge is communicated or withheld. Courtesy Hyde Park Art Center<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More exhibition reviews<\/b><\/h3>\n

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