Jihyun Park is a South Korean artist born in 1970 in Seoul, where he lives and works. He trained in sculpture at Hongik University, Seoul, completing a Bachelor and then a Master of Fine Arts, before earning a second Master of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2002.

Park is best known for his ongoing Thomson series, made from industrial waste — the discarded wooden frames left over from Domusong, a Korean die-cutting method used in printing. In the process a steel blade is bent into a shape, mounted on plywood to form a frame, and driven by a press to stamp out stickers, labels and non-standard boxes one sheet at a time; once the job is done the frames, especially the more singular shapes, are thrown away. Park collects these cast-offs from the printing district around Euljiro in Seoul and reworks them into new forms and heights, coating each in pigment mixed with resin that seeps through the gaps left where the blades were bent and pools into vivid overlays of colour across the wood. What arrives as anonymous, purely functional refuse is recovered as sculpture — a quiet meditation on consumption, obsolescence and the residue of the manufacturing city.

Park’s work has been shown widely across South Korea, with exhibitions at the Suwon Museum of Art and the Jeju Museum of Art. He was a finalist for the 2021 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, and his work is held in collections including the Seoul Museum of Art; Deutsche Bank, New York; and the Waldorf Astoria, Beijing.