So Young Park
So Young Park is a Vienna-based artist working across live performance and performative installation. She received her BA in Korean Painting and MA in Intermedia Art in Seoul (KR) and is currently studying Performance Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT).
Her practice explores the in-between state of living and dying, approaching life and death as interwoven conditions of existence. Through her concept of Warm-Death, she explores mortality, fragility, and ephemerality as conditions embedded in everyday life.
Park received Birgit Jürgenssen Prize in 2026 and was nominated for the Ö1 Talentestipendium für Bildende Kunst by Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2025. Her work was recently presented at Frieze Seoul (2026), Österreichische Postsparkasse (2026), WUK Projektraum (2026), and Dom Museum Wien (2025). As a member of Yi-um Collective, together with Sunggu Hong and June Hwajung, she has collaborated with Belvedere 21 (2025), Kultursommer Wien (2023, 2025), Klima Biennale (2024, 2026), Das Weisse Haus (2024, 2025) and Korean Cultural Center (2025, 2026).
“(...) Warm-Death, a way of integrating death into daily life with tenderness and attentiveness, embracing fragility and transience as inherent rhythms of existence.”
So Young Park is a Vienna-based Korean artist working at the intersection of live performance and performative installation.
Her practice explores the in-between state of living and dying, approaching life and death not as opposites, but as interwoven conditions of existence. By tracing the memories inscribed in her own body, Park re-experiences the time her body has witnessed and lived through, sensing how presence and absence coexist. This embodied act of revisiting forms the core of her methodology, allowing her to encounter the liveness of the present as well as the fragility of existence.
Her performative installations extend these bodily experiences into temporal and spatial forms, where gesture and objects unfold as living narratives. Working with fragile materials such as dried plants, flowers, and seeds elements that hold both vitality and vulnerability, Park creates spaces for ephemerality, mourning, and the resonance of absence. She names this approach Warm-Death, a way of integrating death into daily life with tenderness and attentiveness, embracing fragility and transience as inherent rhythms of existence.
