Studio Grant holder in Göteborg 1 September 2026 – 30 November 2026

Soyoung Kwon is an artist and researcher based in Seoul, South Korea. Her practice examines how artistic research can reveal relationships between cultural memory, ecological transformation, and material knowledge. Working through installation, performance, sound, and collaborative research, she investigates care not as a theme but as a methodology—one that connects people, places, objects, and ecosystems through shared processes of making, listening, and maintenance.

Photo: Soyoung Kwon

Soyoung Kwon

Central to her practice is Sprout House (Saessakine), an artist-run research space and collective project that serves as a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration among artists, researchers, and curators. Through residencies, workshops, field research, and public programmes, Sprout House develops long-term investigations into tactile knowledge, vernacular craft, fermentation, and ecological archives. Kwon’s recent research focuses on shrinking rural communities, exploring how disappearing local knowledge, material traditions, and environmental change can be documented and reinterpreted through artistic practice. Bringing together contemporary art, craft traditions, and scientific research, her work proposes new forms of archival practice that foreground embodied knowledge, ecological relationships, and foreground embodied knowledge and material practices as living forms of cultural and ecological memory.

During her IASPIS residency, Kwon will explore how cultural memory persists through material practices, landscapes, and everyday acts of care. Working in Gothenburg, a maritime city shaped by migration, trade, and movement, she is interested in the often invisible ways memory, labour, language, and care are carried across generations, places, and institutions. Rather than beginning with official historical narratives, her research turns toward the people, materials, and everyday practices through which knowledge continues to circulate. It follows the subtle movements of memory between archive and rumour, bureaucracy and lived experience, tracing how histories endure through oral transmission, ecological relationships, and material culture. Through conversations, archival research, walking, and making, she hopes to expand this inquiry in dialogue with the places and communities she encounters during the residency, approaching the archive not as a fixed repository of the past but as a living process of transmission and transformation.

Soyoung Kwon received an MS in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena. Recent exhibitions and projects include Green Room, a collaboration with DongHwan Kam, Breathing, SeoSeoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2026); BarBarBar, a collaboration with Sparkling Tap Water, Dream Screen, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2024); and Broken Rhythm, a collaborative workshop and performance with Sparkling Tap Water and KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2024). She is the founder of Sprout House, an artist-run research space in Seoul, and is currently developing Tactile Archive Lab, an artistic research project that explores how embodied knowledge can be archived through touch, vibration, sound, and material practices, explores how touch, vibration, sound, and material practices can expand the archive beyond documentation, allowing it to be experienced as a shared, embodied, and ecological form of knowledge.