Sun Young Kang
Still Life

Media: Cast paper using recycled fiber from discarded paper
Size: 13" x 31" x 7.5"
$500

Artist Statement:
My art has always focused on the duality fundamental to human existence: of different realities or worlds both in space and time and the tension between them; and of the co-existence of antithetical ideas, how death implies life, how the material realm implies the unsubstantial or nonphysical, and how absence implies presence. To explore this, I create both physical and metaphorical spaces ranging from large installations to small intimate books.

I was born and raised in Korea, but my career as an artist has been established in the USA. As an immigrant artist, who bridges two cultures, I have felt I belonged to neither, but, rather, am marginal, residing on the edge of each. My art visualizes the space in between, the boundary that, while separating the two, connects them in that one implies the other. For me, trying to bridge two identities, that boundary has a personal, emotional resonance.

Visually my work is minimal, delicate, and obsessively repetitive. I am influenced by the Korean philosophy of Yeo-baek as well as the monochrome paintings of the Korean Dansaekehwa artists. The materials I use — mostly paper, thread, my own hair, and lights (to create shadows) — have metaphoric meaning. Paper is both light and strong. Also, its having front and back in one space becomes a metaphor for the inseparability of antithetical ideas. The paper tubes that I have used in several of my installations constitute the boundary dividing the inside from the outside, but that boundary also connects the two spaces. The shed hair with which I have embroidered paper is both mine and no longer mine. The unsubstantial shadows cast on the ceiling overhead in some of my installations have a visual presence, perhaps even more perceptual weight than the paper sculpture suspended in the middle of the space. The repetition in my practice symbolizes or is even the embodiment of the passing of time, time made spatial.

The piece that I submit is a photograph as well as a physical arrangement of small objects from two large separated projects which are currently in progress or have been suspended due to the pandemic. They were all created with the cast-paper technique using recycled fiber from discarded paper with my question of “Our relationship to the materiality of the culture.” By combining the cast paper objects of dinnerware and the skull models of extinct primate species (human’s relatives), I arranged them in the manner of creating a Vanitas painting, the message of which is inevitable in the current circumstance.

Biography

Sun Young Kang (강선영) is a book and installation artist. Originally from South Korea, Kang resided in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, PA for over a decade and currently she is in Western New York. From small intimate books to room-size installations, she uses paper with its duality of strength and delicacy to create physical and conceptual space. Kang received her MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA in 2007, and BFA in Korean Painting from Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, Korea.

Kang recently named as the 2020 UAH Contemporary Art Fellow funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) American Community Grant Program at The University of Alabama at Huntsville and also an Artist in Residence at Coalesce Center for Biological Art also funded by NEA at The State University of New York at Buffalo for 2019-2020 academic year.

She is a recipient of the West Collection LIFTS Grant and Acquisition Award, 2020; New York Foundation for the Arts (NYSCA/NYFA) Artist Fellowship in Architecture/ Environmental Structures/ Design; Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, 2019; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award, 2017-2018; the PRIX WHANKI 2017 from Whanki Museum/ Foundation in Seoul, Korea and the Center for the Emerging Visual Artists Fellowship in Philadelphia, 2013-2015.

Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally at venues including Whanki Museum, Seoul Korea; Queens Museum, NY; Whatcom Museum, WA; Carnegie Museum of Arts; Pennsylvania State Museum; the Susquehanna Art Museum, PA; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts; Mainline Art Center and Philadelphia Art Alliance, PA. Her work is also included in the West Collection, Pennsylvania State Museum's permanent collection, Museum of Modern Art Franklin Furnace Artist book collection, and in numerous libraries’ special collections.

https://www.sunyoungkang.com/