Andy Nicholas Li and Hyunjin Park: Will-o'-the-Wisp

Exhibition Abstract

The will-o'-the-wisp is a ghostly light that dwells nightly in bogs, swamps, and marshes. It may be a spirit, a vision, a mirage. It may be bioluminescence caused by the decay of once-living things. Through sculpture, installation, drawing, and video, this exhibition takes the will-o'-the-wisp as a figure for what is experienced and impossible to grasp but is all worth the trying: from birth to death, from grief to shame, from longing to love.

Biographies

Hyunjin Park (M.F.A. '25) is based in Seoul, currently working in Ithaca, New York. She explores the boundaries between the ephemeral and eternal, life and death, and intimate encounters by reinterpreting Korean traditional motifs, childhood, and plant and animal bodies, with a specific focus on representations of dogs. Working expansively across video, installation, drawing, and performances, particularly with women artists, she considers how acts of care for non-human entities can shape our relationship to art-making, both materially and conceptually.

Andy Nicholas Li (M.F.A. '25) is an artist and educator based in Ithaca, New York, and Chicago, Illinois. Li's work has been exhibited at ACRE Projects, the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and Hyde Park Art Center, among others. Collaborative projects have appeared at places such as AS220, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Singapore Art Book Fair. Some of Li's paintings are featured in New American Paintings, Midwest #167. A short story of Li's, "Prologue to the Death of Julian," was published in The Notre Dame Review.