Birgit Jürgenssen Award Winner 2026: So Young Park

The jury honors the new winner of the Birgit Jürgenssen Award, So Young Park, for an artistic practice that combines performative subtlety and sculptural precision based on a poetic approach. In her works, she brings bodies and objects into new, carefully composed relationships, and understands sculpture as something processual—activated only through action, touch, and duration. The viewers are also involved, as their perception and physical presence lend the works an additional dimension.

Central to So Young Park's work is the understanding of emotion as movement—as an arrangement of memory fragments that constantly rearranges itself in the performative moment. Metal structures, textile elements, and sound settings act as traces of past encounters; they refer to memory as something that is not preserved but continually reconstructed in the act of repetition and overwriting.

The opulent yet delicate materiality of her works underscores this dynamic. The sculptural elements of her settings appear not merely as props, but as independent actors that enable action and offer resistance. So Young Park consistently reflects on the relationship between body and object. In this, the jury recognizes a continuation of central questions in the work of Birgit Jürgenssen: the examination of the body, role models, and material attributions. So Young Park develops an independent artistic language based on this.

So Young Park (*1997) 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 notion 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 as well as the fragility of existence.