Artist: So Young Park

So Young Park is a Vienna-based Korean artist working at the intersection of performative installation and live performance. Her practice explores the in-between state of living and dying, deconstructing the binary of life and death. 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 remembering forms the core of her methodology, allowing her to encounter the liveness of the present and the fragility of existence.

Her performative installations translate these bodily experiences into time-based and spatial forms, where gesture and objects generate new living narratives. Working with fragile materials such as dried plants, flowers, and seeds holding both vitality and vulnerability, Park creates spaces for ephemerality, mourning, and the resonance of absence.

With the term ‘Warm-Death’, Park describes her approach to integrating death into daily life with tenderness and attentiveness, embracing the ways fragility and transience are woven into everyday existence.

So Young Park is the winner of the Birgit Jürgenssen Award 2026

The award ceremony will take place on Tuesday, 21 April 2026, in the Auditorium of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.