Korean Sculptor Dies at 48

Suki Seokyeong Kang, a Korean sculptor who inventively revisited traditional Korean artistic styles and gained a worldwide following for it, died on Sunday at 48. Seoul’s Kukje Gallery announced her passing on Monday. Tina Kim Gallery, her New York representative, said in a statement that she died after a years-long battle with cancer.

Kang repeatedly took up centuries-old art forms—Joseon Dynasty–era painting, 600-year-old forms of musical notation, and more—and then used these modes as the basis for her own sculptures, which were distinctly contemporary-looking. Those sculptures were often highly conceptual, requiring no small degree of historical knowledge to understand them in full, but even if their ideas proved elusive for some, their aesthetic has been seductive for many.

Her sculptures appeared in biennials all across the globe, from Gwangju to Venice, and have been the subject of museum surveys, including one at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art in 2023. Her work currently fills the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, in what is being billed as her largest-ever US show.

She repeatedly displayed an interest in how humanity relates to nature, both the real thing and images of it—something that is evident at her MCA show, which features works from her “Mountain” series, begun in 2020. These sculptures take their inspiration from si-seo-hwa, a traditional Korean style in which written poetry, inked calligraphic marks, and painted landscapes are placed alongside one another. For her take on the style, Kang hinged together curved, freestanding frames, insetting within them wooden mountain ranges beneath suspended hwamunseok fibers, which are typically used in mats.

The “Mountain” series related to Kang’s undergraduate days, during which she studied ink painting at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, where she taught art courses at the time of her death. She was struck that a painting could be said to depict a mountain, even though it was really just marks on a piece of paper. “When I studied traditional Korean painting, it was hard for my youthful mind to adapt to that very old philosophy,” she told Art Basel’s magazine this year.

Other pieces explored the way one’s body relates to a work of art. Her “Grandmother Tower” series, which started in 2011, was an homage to her own grandmother, whose hunched form she recreated using stacked metal objects. “I perceived her body as a frame that only refers to her form in a beautifully humorous way,” Kang told Pin-Up. “Even if her life was nearly gone, she always tried to stand as straight as possible even she had no strength in her body.” Kang then wrapped her objects in dyed thread, to “create more friction between the units.”

Often, Kang called on performers—students a Venice art university, residents of a Swedish city, among others—to interact with her sculptures, and did not seem to mind if these performances didn’t go exactly as planned. “People don’t have to follow notations too perfectly,” she told Cultured. “It’s more about thinking about your body inside of this space.”

Suki Seokyeong Kang was born in Seoul in 1977. She attended Ewha Womans University’s oriental painting program, both as an undergraduate and a graduate, and received an M.A. in painting from London’s Royal College of Art in 2012. Kang did not abandon painting entirely, sometimes showing hwamunseok works on hung walls alongside her sculptures. But the majority of her output was three-dimensional.

She started showing widely at international biennials in the mid-2010s, appearing first at the Gwangju Biennale in 2016. Yet it was not until 2018 that she received wider recognition. That year, she took home Art Basel’s Baloise Art Prize, exhibited again at the Gwangju Biennale, made her debuts at the Shanghai Biennale and the Liverpool Biennial, and had solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia and Tina Kim Gallery.

The next year, her “Grandmother Tower” sculptures were shown at the Venice Biennale, though given their understated nature, it was easy for viewers to pass by without a proper study. By the time of her Leeum Museum show, however, it had become hard to ignore her art. In his Artforum review of that survey, Andrew Russeth wrote, “You have to look closely at her meticulous, gemlike objects to tease out their full allusive and anthropomorphic power and to grasp the import of the traditional Korean crafts that she adapts.”

Her Leeum Museum show was in many ways her magnum opus, featuring her sculptures alongside video elements, audio of poetry read aloud by artist Kevin Oh, and more. She described the exhibition as both a recontextualization of her own art and of Korea’s past.

“While reflecting on these matters,” she told the Korea Times, “a series of significant life events unfolded, including childbirth and my battle with cancer. It was during this period that the mountains from those old paintings, which had previously appeared as vast, abstract masses to me, suddenly drew closer. They felt like something small and precious.”

Throughout the show, visitors could hear the sounds of wind blowing and thousands of orioles chirping. Speaking to the Korea Times, she said, “That’s what art is, in the end―collaborating and coexisting with others.”