Contact Admin. Sena Park is a Paihia-based artist, whose sculptural works explores language through material relationships. Park was selected to take part in the 5th Land Art Mongolia o Biennial earlier this year, where she undertook a residency to develop new work.
In this two part account, Park reflects on her experiences and time in Ulaanbaatar, and the work she produced there. Read the Korean version here. In , our family migrated to New Zealand. While I was living in Korea, I was very timid and afraid of speaking in front of people even when I spoke in Korean, my mother tongue. I encountered even more scary and hopeless social situations. It has now been 22 years since I migrated to New Zealand.
I returned to Korea to work for few years and since then, I have visited to Korea only every few years. While I am there, I realise how easy it is to socialise in Korean. I feel like I can express anything. I live and work in New Zealand now.
I am still stressed by my lack of confidence caused by the language barriers. Such a silly and vain hope compelled me to move on. But I began to frame a hypothesis in my imagination. If I am in a non-English speaking country, if everyone communicated in their second language, it might feel like we were all standing on same start line. I started to search for artist residencies among non-English speaking countries for this stupid reason.
I had never thought about visiting Mongolia before. It looked like an exciting challenge for me to work with land art. I thought it would be a great chance to meet with and learn from other international artists. Furthermore, it was located a non-English speaking country.
