Lina Sun Park Weaves A Spell From The Every Day

Lina Sun Park’s art feels like a secret you weren’t supposed to know. She takes the things you overlook—lace scraps, a crumbling slice of bread, a melting wedge of cheese—and places them somewhere they don’t belong but somehow fit perfectly. Her miniature worlds are playful, sometimes mournful, always alive.

When Lina talks about her process, it’s like listening to someone narrate a daydream. She’ll mention growing up in her family’s restaurant, where the art of arranging food seeped into her bones before she even knew what art was. Or how she finds inspiration in the quiet moments—crumbs left on a table after a meal, the way fabric folds when no one’s looking. Her work doesn’t shout; it hums.

In November, Lina completed her residency at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, curated by Byline (that’s us!), where she spent weeks immersed in her process of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. The work she created during this time will debut in her exhibition, "The House, It’s Dreaming!" It promises to be a world of small, disarming wonders—objects that feel both deeply familiar and like they’ve wandered out of a dream.

Her art is a whisper: Look. Closer. No, closer. And suddenly, the smallest thing—a ribbon, a grape, a crumb—becomes a portal to a story you didn’t know you needed.

"The House, It's Dreaming!" is on view at Ace Hotel Brooklyn through February 2025.

Gutes Guterman: Let’s start off big and tall – what does “beauty” mean to you?

Lina Sun Park: Beauty to me is a feeling, a visceral one. You’re overtaken by this feeling and you intuitively know you’re in the presence of, or just experienced something beautiful.

GG: As an artist, do you feel any responsibility to capture beauty, redefine it, or question it? None or all of the above?

LSP: Yes to all of this. All three are so important to keep the ball rolling. The idea of beauty is so personal that anyone inherently expressing their version of beauty will naturally redefine it for someone else. This creates this ever-evolving concept of beauty. As one grows and ages, they change and thus their idea of beauty changes and grows with them. Beauty kind of can’t exist without continually being redefined and questioned.

GG: Do your background and heritage influence your perception of beauty and the narratives in your art?

LSP: My parents had Japanese restaurants growing up, I spent a lot of time there as a kid. There were always these glossy paged calendars and printed matter of beautifully presented food, with simple but precisely shaped garnishes. So much intention and design and array of colors were witnessed. It took me a second to realize in hindsight that all of this must always be somewhere in the back of my mind.

I’m also inspired by Korean words that don’t have a direct translation in English. There’s this space that feels very strange where there’s such delightful specificity, but then this kind of void on the other hand of not having the words to articulate it in another language. That space lights up my brain to think of ways that different things can be conveyed, but it also really invites me to zero in on very specific feelings, sounds, and things.

Perhaps this is far-fetched, but my parents immigrated here from Korea, and my dad had an idea of American food, but he just improvised a lot of it based on flavor parallels. He’s kind of the master of weird combinations. He would make us these sandwiches of sliced wheat bread, a slice of Kraft American single, romaine, peanut butter, strawberry jam, and an egg. Or it would be strawberry cream cheese instead of jam. It sounds really gross but somehow it tasted pretty good. And I think something about these strange combinations and doing whatever you pleased really stuck with me, and carried over into ways I might combine things, like ribbon with cheese or bread. Some people like it, and some people really hate it.

One of the reasons I gravitated towards working with bread, very processed bread, is that it reminds me of childhood and nostalgia, school lunches, and my parents making me these specific lunches. Though sliced bread is nostalgic and comforting to me as it was a childhood staple, as an adult, I can see it is so processed and full of preservatives. I had a bread and ribbon installation piece in a group show once, and thought it would only last for the opening night in the summer heat, but due to the preservatives, they were fine as is, for the whole month-long duration of the show. I see them more as a medium than food. It's interesting to see what brings you comfort, even though you don't engage it like you once did.

GG: You’re working as the artist-in-residence at the Ace Hotel in Brooklyn. Has this environment influenced your ideas about beauty or the exhibition?

LSP: Coming down the elevator and having the doors open up to the exhibition space is really special, knowing that my work will be there soon. There’s a variety of people who stay here, and it’s interesting to try to see how your work might be perceived through the eyes of someone passing through. I am excited to have a wider audience be exposed to my work and definitely contemplate notions of beauty on a wider scale and how they may or may not tie into mine. It’s got me putting a personal microscope on my work, and I’m asking myself more questions during my process than my usual intuitive working style.

GG: What does it feel like to be in an unfamiliar space working on art?

LSP: It makes you realize real fast how your environment keeps your mind in a certain headspace. My studio is very full of tchotchkes and little things that comfort me. Being in an unfamiliar space is freeing however, it allows you some breathing space to let new ideas come in which might not have come otherwise.

GG: How would you describe your relationship with materials, and do you feel certain materials hold a unique kind of beauty?

LSP: To me, any material can become my medium. Everything has potential, and there is beauty to that, but simultaneously, an overwhelming heaviness of too much endless possibility. I love quotidian materials, particularly ones that are perishable, ephemeral, and fragile. Quotidian materials hold a space, whether bad or good, in everyone’s mind. To see such an unremarkable thing transformed into something grand, seems to bring out a deeply positive or negative feeling in most. It begs the question if those ordinary things are allowed to be beautiful, or even allowed to be art on top of that - especially if they don’t have object permanence.

GG: Some materials you use are fragile, transient, and even prone to decay over time. What does “preciousness” mean to you in the context of your art?

LSP: I might make something out of toilet paper and then spend so much time carefully displaying or transporting the piece. If I go to the grocery store to buy bread for a piece, I’ll really look at each one and choose the one that feels the most special, the most beautiful. When the cashier bags the items, I’ll try to do it myself so it’s not just thrown into the cart. But the preciousness isn’t with the material per se, but with what it’s transformed into. It just happens to be made of something not regarded as precious or special.

GG: Last question, a more philosophical one — does beauty need to be “seen,” or can it exist in the intangible aspects of creating?

LSP: Beauty can most definitely exist in the intangible aspects of creating. Something does not need to look “beautiful” to conjure feelings of beauty or to be beautiful. It may be evoking or speaking of something quite beautiful and is evidence of or a result of something beautiful. If something is touched by beauty even once in its evolution, I think it will still show in varying degrees in its current state, whether that be art or anything else.