Sungmin Park is a Korean painter born in 1968 in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province, who lives and works in South Korea. He studied painting at Hongik University, Seoul.

His practice is devoted to hyperrealist oil painting, best known for the ongoing “Ice Capsule” series begun in 2002, in which flowers, vines and fruit appear suspended inside blocks of ice. Yet the ice he paints cannot exist; stems pass freely through the solid, rendering impossible objects with photographic precision. Park uses the mutability of water — shifting between solid, liquid and gas — as a device to examine states of the in-between, memory, and the boundary between reality and illusion. More recently he has turned to the textures of ceramic surfaces, layering oil into fields that edge his hyperrealism toward the aesthetics of monochrome painting, where the image dissolves into abstraction at its most articulate.

In 2004, Park won the Grand Prize for the non-representational category of the 23rd Grand Art Exhibition of Korea and the Dong-A Art Prize; he also won the 2003 Grand Prize in the Sinsaimdang Art Competition. His work is held in major Korean collections including the Seoul Museum of Art; Arts Council Korea, Naju; the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Sejong; and the Korean Folk Village Art Museum, Yongin.