Suki Seokyeong Kang (1977–2025)
132May 7, 2025
Korean multidisciplinary artist Suki Seokyeong Kang, who drew from traditional Korean culture and techniques to create dynamic works that cast such historically long-standing issues as social roles and the human relation to landscape in a contemporary light, died on April 27 after a long bout with cancer. She was forty-seven. Her death was announced by New York’s Tina Kim Gallery, which represents her. Kang through a practice encompassing sculpture, painting, weaving, installation, video, and performance, investigated themes of connection, presence, and space as a social structuring device. Constructed according to self-imposed strictures, her work often required close looking, and rewarded the viewer with the rush of emotion born of seeing one’s own lived experience unexpectedly recognized by another. “Suki Seokyeong Kang,” wrote Andrew Russeth in a 2024 issue ofArtforum, “can break your heart.”
Suki Seokyeong Kang was born in Seoul on May 19, 1977. After studying the East Asian tradition of ink painting at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, she earned her MA in painting from London’s Royal College of Art. Among the Korean artistic traditions, many of them dating back centuries, that informed her practice weresi-seo-hwa, a Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) painting style blending poetry and calligraphy with landscape painting;jeongganbo, a fifteenth-century musical notation system to which she referred in her gridded geometric abstractions; andhwamunseok, handwoven reed mats historically used to provide cool seating in the summertime.
Kang often combined soft organic materials such as mulberry paper and dyed wool with hard metals like steel and brass. Her series “Mountain,” 2020–, embodied this dichotomy, comprising curved steel sheets resembling the titular form, some of these draped with brightly hued threads whose arrangement might recall a tumbling waterfall or an eruption of plants. A similar contrast is evident in her well-known “Grandmother Tower” series, begun in 2011. Composed of hooped dish carriers bound together with thread to form drum shapes that she then heaped atop one another in bent, human scale structures whose hunched posture recalled that of an aged person, these works were variously mounted on tea trolleys or wheeled walkers, their ability to be placed in motion further implying the precarity of navigating the world as a very old person.
Kang’s wall-hung work, too, evinces the relation between space and the individual. Her “Mat” series were inspired by Chunaengmu, a dance performed upon ahwamunseokby women of the Korean court. The works’ geometric designs are based on thejeongganbomusical notation system, in which each square of a grid represents at once tone, duration, gesture, and lyrics. Made of steel and the aforementioned handwoven mats, the “Mats” imply the minimum space the individual is allowed to take up in society. Her daily series “Mora,” begun in 2014 and named after a term describing the smallest phonological unit of spoken language, equal to or briefer than a syllable, are compositions of translucent pigments layered atop mulberry paper or silk, conjuring through their repeated patterns the passage of time. The paintings are roughly twenty by sixteen inches each. “I specifically chose these dimensions as they can hide a body or torso,” Kang toldOcula’s Stephanie Bailey in 2018. “In this work, painting functions as the space that embraces time and where narrative piles up. As the size of the painting expands, both two-dimensionally and three-dimensionally, so does the space of time and narrative contained within the frame.”
Kang participated in the 2019 Venice Biennale, the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, and the 2018 Shanghai Biennale as well as the 2018 and 2016 editions of the Gwangju Biennale; she won the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2018. In 2023, her work appeared in the group exhibition “The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. Her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, “Mountain–Hour–Face,” her largest US institutional show ever, closed on May 4. Her work is held in the collections of museums around the globe, among them the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Booth Collection–University of Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; mudam, Luxembourg; and the Amorepacific Museum of Art, the Leeum Museum of Art, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and the Seoul Museum of Art, all in Seoul.
“Even if the process is unclear from the finished work, I hope my viewers engage with their own thoughts to find out what they need to do or think in order to interpret the work,” Kang told Bailey. “The focus on the individual in my work is a precondition for finding out how we can protect our own hearts, while relying on each other to walk forward together.”