The first time I saw images of Jongjin Park’s Strata of Illusion, I genuinely could not figure out what I was looking at. It reads like a compressed canyon wall, like strata lifted from geological time, like something that took millennia to form. It does not look like something a person assembled in a studio over a matter of months. That disconnect between the familiar and the seemingly impossible is, I think, exactly the point.
Park is a Korean ceramic artist and assistant professor at Seoul Women’s University, and earlier this year he took home the 2026 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize for Strata of Illusion, one of the most prestigious honors in contemporary craft. The prize comes with €50,000, but the work itself is worth far more attention than a check.
Designer: Jongin Park
Here is what makes it so remarkable. The sculpture is built from thousands of sheets of ordinary tissue paper. Park coats each sheet in porcelain slip mixed with hand-mixed pigments, then folds, stacks, and presses them together into a dense, rectilinear mass that resembles a partially collapsed seat. Then he fires the whole thing in a kiln. At high temperatures, the paper burns completely away. What remains is a ceramic body that has shifted, bent, and settled under its own weight and the heat, shaped not entirely by the artist’s hands but by forces the material encounters on its own.
The part of his process that genuinely floors me is the surrender in it. Park is not a sculptor in the traditional sense of someone who carves away or imposes a rigid vision onto a material. He sets up conditions. He coats the paper, arranges the layers, builds the compression, and then he cedes control to the kiln. The collapse is not an accident, but it is also not entirely planned. That charged zone between intention and surrender is exactly where Strata of Illusion lives, and it is a hard place to hold without losing your nerve.
The work also occupies a fascinating gray area between ceramics, sculpture, and design, which is part of why it travels so naturally across contexts. Park has shown at Design Miami and PAD London, and the piece feels equally at home in those collectible design spaces as it does in a fine art exhibition. A seat that cannot really be sat upon. A ceramic form that started as something you blow your nose with. A work that looks ancient but was completed last year. The contradictions stack up as deliberately as the paper layers themselves.
Park’s approach demands a kind of trust that is actually quite radical. Not just from the artist, but from the viewer too. You have to accept that the unpredictability is the craft, not the failure of it. We are so conditioned to equate mastery with perfect control that a work like this can feel destabilizing at first. That slight unease is doing something useful, though. It is making you examine what you actually value when you look at something made by hand.
The LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize has long recognized artists who use traditional craft languages to say something larger and more conceptually ambitious. Park’s win feels like a precise fit for that legacy. Strata of Illusion is not just technically extraordinary. It is philosophically loaded in a way that rewards slow, patient looking, which is increasingly rare and increasingly worth seeking out.
The exhibition featuring Park’s work alongside other shortlisted artists is on view at the National Gallery Singapore through June 14. If you happen to be anywhere near it, photographs alone will not prepare you for what the actual scale and texture of the object must feel like in person. There is a density to those compressed layers that images have no way of translating.
For the rest of us, Strata of Illusion offers a genuinely compelling answer to the question of where craft is headed. Not backward into nostalgia, not forward into pure concept. Somewhere in between, fired at high temperatures, shaped by forces no artist fully controls.
The post Thousands of Paper Sheets, One Kiln, One $58K Prize first appeared on Yanko Design.
