Sueyon Yang
The delicate imagery of Sueyon Yang adapts the traditional techniques of Korean painting to modern-day themes. Specifically, Yang investigates the relationship between life and death and the ways in which death influences human activity and belief. Her detailed ink artworks are modern vanitas paintings, reminding us of our mortality and encouraging us to be mindful of our places in the world.
Sueyon Yang.
For more information on Yang’s artwork, please visit her website or Instagram.
When she was three years old, Yang began painting and has not stopped since. She moved from the United States to Korea and then to Hong Kong to pursue her career. Now based between Korea and Hong Kong, she is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in Fine Art at Seoul National University. Yang developed her artistic career whilst working as a researcher producing cultural heritage replicas for national museums in Korea. This work allowed her to closely study traditional paintings in the museum collections, where she intimately encountered and explored these works’ exquisite detail and powerful brushstrokes. Their beauty struck her in ways she could not imagine.
Yang consolidated this inspirational experience into her artistic practice, painting with ink on silk or paper. This is most obviously seen in her employment of older techniques, which she uses to understand modern anxieties better - particularly as she grapples with the looming prospect of death that is inherent to life.
The Ten Immortals - Deluge, 2020. Ink on Korean paper, 119 x 84 cm.
Yang is especially fascinated by the mythologies and superstitions humans create to prevent death and live eternally. For example, in Korean culture, it is believed that owning a painting of the sip-jan-seang-do, or the ten natural symbols of immortality, will bring the owner a long, healthy life. Some such symbols are the sun, moon, clouds, rocks, mountains, pine trees, deer, water, and cranes. This legend motivated Yang to create her Ten Immortals series, in which we can see several of these emblems of immortality. The series represents the tension between our striving for eternal life and our mortal reality and encompasses the feelings of fear we feel toward death.
In The Ten Immortals - Deluge, the water symbolises longevity, passiveness, and flexibility as per Korean tradition. However, Yang morphs this meaning into something more sinister as the water overflows and rushes throughout the bottom half of the painting.
The Ten Immortals 3, 2020. Ink on Korean paper, 162 x 260 cm.
In The Ten Immortals 3, the deer on the bottom left has no face. This illustrates the abstract concept of the unknown, one of the more distressing prospects of death. Thus, Yang imprints her artistic signature onto tradition through visual subtleties such as these. In doing so, she challenges the viewer to actively search for these finer points and personally scrutinise or contemplate why she has included the symbols in this manner.
This understated, paradoxical symbolism features in many of her works. Her 2018 series of paintings entitled Never Has Been, Never Will Be employs some of the same motifs as The Ten Immortals, such as the faceless deer and the crane. But Never Has Been, Never Will Be enlarges the scale of these motifs to focus on Yang’s reversal of their meanings rather than situating them amongst their natural landscape. The crane, for example, falls downward, even though birds intuitively fly upward. This represents humans’ ambitions toward eternity thwarted.
In these ways, Yang’s paintings not only carry on established Korean painting methods and themes but also the idea of the Western vanitas. Vanitas paintings typically showcase symbols suggesting death and intended to remind the viewer of their mortality. Unlike Yang’s work, however, vanitas images are usually still lifes. Yang instead transposes these concerns onto the natural world.
Ultimately, in the way Yang reveals death’s omnipresence, she also aims to convey the possibilities of life - she believes in being cognisant of your position in the world and how you fit into life’s grander scheme.
Her ink-on-silk painting, The Journey to the Infinite Circle (2021), envisions life’s prospects through the motions of folding and unfolding. It does so in its format, as it is a traditional folding screen. Yet, when it opens and closes, it reveals its hidden story. This transformational motion embodies the spectrum of human life and highlights its capacity and potential for change.
The Journey to the Infinite Circle, 2021. Ink on silk, stainless steel, 261 x 118 x 192 cm.
Yang continues to explore these themes and rich symbolic meanings as she works on the artworks and thesis for her doctoral degree. She will also be joining the residency program at the Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art (YEMCA) in Gwangju, where she will be able to focus fully on the art-making process. In addition, she will have a solo exhibition from April 29 to May 28 at YEMCA, where she will display an upcoming series entitled The Things that We Don’t See. This series will emphasise the theme of mindfulness and, specifically, what it means to live life on the edge of nothingness, a new avenue within a previously explored subject matter.
The Ten Immortals - Deluge is currently on view at H. Edward Gallery in New York. All images courtesy of the artist.
Solo Exhibitions
2022
Perpetual, Ashurst Emerging Artist Gallery, Ashurst LLP, London, UK
2021
The Journey to the Infinite Circle, CICA Museum, Gimpo-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea
2019
The Possibility of Impossibility, Gallery Ilho, Seoul, Korea
2012
Eternity, World Venture Gallery, Seoul, Korea
Group Exhibitions
2022
Yi Tai Sculpture & Installation Projects, Art Central, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong
2021
2021 Ghasong Art Award the 7th - <Summer Condescendence>, Insa Art Center, Seoul, Korea
Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize - Shortlist Exhibition, Ashurst LLP, London, UK
Young & Young Artist Project, Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwangju-si, Gyunggi-do, Korea
2020
Past 2 Years - Selected, Gallery Sisun, Seoul, Korea
Seongnam Art Bank Acquisitions, Seongnam Cube Art Museum Bandal Gallery, Seongnam-si, Gyunggi-do, Korea
2017
Mentor & Mentee, Hanwon Museum, Seoul, Korea
Contemporary Korean Art - Identity and Formativeness, Vidi Gallery, Seoul, Korea
Gabriella Hetu
Emerging Artists Co-Editor, MADE IN BED