소개말
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.
Q.작품을 통해 전달하고자 하는 메시지는 무엇인가요?
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 see the audience as key to my work, as completing it. When the work is an installation, not only can an audience immerse itself in the experience of the space, but also can become a part of what others experience, thus contributing to the work’s interactive aspect.
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. 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. I am drawn to using motion sensors for their ability to evoke in an audience a sense of being both actor and acted upon, encouraging them—in their creation of a space that envisions the boundary between the antithetical ideas of light and shadows— to dwell in uncertainty.