In Chicago, Yoonshin Park Explores the Boundaries of the Book

“Sometimes stories can be delivered without saying words,” artist Yoonshin Park tells Observer. “They can be delivered through shapes, materials, colors—a more direct way of delivering messages.” Park’s exhibit at the Hyde Park Arts Center in Chicago, “Prompt and Prompted,” pushes at the edges of what a book can be and how stories can be told through them. The first piece viewers see upon entering the exhibit is a long, thin sheaf of white paper tied in a loose knot, marked with black ink spots that evoke some mysterious alphabet. The piece, I can no longer see./Whose story remains? from a series titled “How (Not To) Read,” sets the tone for the rest of the exhibition, which twists and contorts itself around, near and away from the form of the book and the meaning of the content.

Another piece titled When pages move, the words wander/Covered, concealed, yet still breathing from the same series, is a cluster of loops of ink-marked paper hanging down the wall—somewhat comical, somewhat sinister, like a cow that has come unspooled. Works from the “Tied” series are rectangular wall-mounted collections of handmade paper, tied together, creating colored or shaded tactile sculptures that communicate through color, shading and texture rather than words.

Another group of wall-mounted installations from 2025 blurs the line between bookshelf and book. Here, each giant “book,” all covered with those same inky blots and scribbles, is festooned with shelves and niches on which more marked paper is folded and fanned out—books within books, or non-books within non-books, depending on how closely you want to read. The most striking of these is Neither flat nor fixed, an L-shape installation that towers up on the wall and then slides out onto the floor, like a bed with a giant headboard attached. Rolled-up paper spools, like canisters, rest on the flat plane of the “book,” evoking scrolls of unreadable secrets.

Park was born and raised in South Korea; she came to Chicago to study at Columbia College. Books, she says, speak from culture to culture and language to language. A book “is where we could get information. Translation happens through books; it’s a space to enter interchange.”

In the exhibition, that interchange is both open and somewhat opaque—promising and withholding at once. Park’s “Against the Grain” series consists of booklets screwed to the wall of the gallery, where they hang in a random pattern. They suggest informational pamphlets or brochures pinned on bulletin boards at a school, travel center or other communal venue, but look more closely, and they’re blank. The only content is that which you imagined might be in them, like books in a language you can’t read.

A book always implies a writer, a reader and the meaning shared between them, and Park’s show builds on and plays with this relationship. By enlarging and scrambling what a book can be, she addresses meaning and communication. And sometimes, she invites other people to create books with her.

One room of the exhibition is devoted to works created by Park’s students; another is devoted to works Park created in response to prompts from her students. Both are filled with a bewildering, delightful array of variations on what books can be, inspired by words and phrases translated into objects in odd and unexpected ways.

Priya Deb’s To be held/not held looks like a toilet paper spool made of rough black cotton pulp paper—its texture both enticing and ominous. Virginia Van Vynckt’s If a Tree Falls is a series of marbled copper invitation cards with elliptical cursive messages such as “please return/may all return.”

Park’s work in this section is mostly responses to one-word prompts, and while the pieces are less monumental than those in the rest of the gallery, they still challenge ideas of what a book can be or say. One inspired by the word ‘escape’ looks like a collection of sheets of silvery plastic bound together; the leaves have pieces of paper stuck to them that say, “please push”… “PLEASE FLATTEN”… “I need to be flat.” Is the book itself asking for help? Is the suggestion that someone is stuck inside it? The line between book and reader and writer is literally flattened; you—or someone—is trapped in what you read.

A piece based on the prompt ‘weaving’ is an open book, hollowed out like a trick tome that might contain liquor. But this book doesn’t hold alcohol; instead, spilling from the hollow section is a pile of strands or spools clipped from a text. It looks like the book has coughed its guts out. Weaving ideas together, or unweaving them, can be messy.

Park wanted to include student work in the show “to promote the beauty of artist books with a larger crowd.” Bookmaking, she says, “has so many possibilities, and it generates ideas so easily, because it is already a kind of hybrid format.” She added that she wanted to take the conversation about what books are and what they can be from inside the classroom into a more public space.

Part of the joy of reading and of the world of books is the way you can follow people talking to each other and thinking with and against each other across time, across cultures and across borders. There are books about everything, from weaving to escaping to teaching art to learning another language. You read and absorb ideas, and then those ideas emerge in other forms and other places.

Park’s books, in that sense, are true books not despite their errant forms, but because they take the idea of the book somewhere else. Similarly, Park includes the work of her students in her show because her own practice is, like a book, intersubjective—her art is the art she inspires others to make, and the prompts from others that inspire her. For her, the best books are about making new books together—the bigger and more oddly shaped, the better.

“Yoonshin Park: Prompt and Prompted” is at Hyde Park Art Center through May 10, 2026.

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