Hyunjin Park: Jump

Working across performance, video, installation, and sculpture, Hyunjin Park explores the affective impact of the non-human—plants, living beings, and machines—on humans. Her work considers how these emotional resonances blur distinctions between the ancient and the contemporary, life and death, and in turn challenge the notion of the human as inherently superior to all else. In the Sunroom exhibition Jump, the artist focuses on the core obstacle in dog agility courses— “jumps” — which serve to build athleticism and confidence in the dog, and a bond of trust between the dog and handler.

After losing her living dog Popo three years ago, Park adopted Echo, a robot dog operated by AI, that she began training to enhance their inter-species communication and ultimately, to strengthen their bond. The agility training revealed a fundamental tension: while jumping is natural for a living dog, it is risky for Echo’s fragile, mechanical body. Rather than view this as a limitation, Park reimagines the jump as a fleeting suspension of the body—a longing for ascent and a brief defiance of gravity, where the jump becomes a threshold between limitation and possibility, life and non-life. Incorporating sculptural forms that evoke jumps alongside a video projection that includes footage from training sessions recorded through Echo’s perspective, the exhibition reflects on memories of Park’s prior relationship with a living pet. At the same time, it gives form to sentience, vulnerability, care, and failure through the intersecting lenses of human creativity and machine intelligence.