From 6 June to 26 July, the MARV | Museo d’Arte Rubini Vesin in Gradara presents a multi-sensory exhibition by Korean artist Bongsu Park, whose works transform flowers and plants into images, fragrances, and traces to be seen, touched, and inhaled.
Fiori della Memoria, curated by Riccardo Freddo and Luca Baroni is conceived as a deeply immersive sensory experience, the exhibition takes the artist's Janhyang series as both its conceptual and material point of departure, rooted in the very nature of Park’s artistic process: slow, organic, and shaped overtime.
Park’s practice begins with a primordial gesture - planting - which gradually evolves into a complex and profoundly tactile artistic methodology. Plants are gathered, pressed directly onto canvas, and left for months to release their natural pigments through prolonged contact, producing images that are not represented but physically impressed into the surface itself. Once dried, the same vegetal materials are transformed again: preserved within ceramic vessels crafted by the artist and later distilled to extract their scent. It is a process of continual transformation, in which matter becomes trace, presence, and memory - a process that ultimately turns material into art.
From this singular approach emerge multi sensory works capable of activating smell, touch, and sight simultaneously - fragrance, matter, and image converging into one perceptual experience. Memory here is not presented as something fixed or distant, but as something living, unstable, and shared: not merely to be observed, but to be felt.
The show additionally introduces a retrospective dimension dedicated to the artist’s performances. Through video documentation of works such as Dream View (2020), Internal Library – Memory (2017) and Cell (2014), visitors will encounter the continuity of Park’s research: from the collective and social dimensions of dreaming to the more intimate and multi-sensory exploration of memory.
