Suki Seokyeong Kang, 1977–2025
By ANNABEL PRESTON
Portrait of SUKI SEOKYEONG KANG. Courtesy Tina Kim Gallery, New York.
On April 27, renowned Korean multidisciplinary artist Suki Seokyeong Kang passed away at the age of 48, after an extended battle with cancer.
Born in 1977 in Seoul, Kang was originally trained in the East Asian tradition of ink painting at Ewha Womans University in the South Korean capital. In 2012, she graduated with an MA in painting from London’s Royal College of Art. This dual background in classical technique and contemporary discourse shaped Kang’s distinctive practice, which spanned sculpture, painting, textile, performance, and installation.
Time and materiality were central to Kang’s unabated philosophical exploration of the individual’s relation to space, society, and the natural world. Such themes appear in her elegant sculptural series, Mountain (2020– ), for which Kang fashioned steel sheets into curved mountain forms, draping each with colorful dyed threads to resemble flowing waterfalls or plants. Kang also drew inspiration from centuries-old Korean artistic traditions, such as si-seo-hwa, a painting style from the Joseon Dynasty combining poetry and calligraphy with landscape painting; Jeongganbo, a 15th-century musical notation system which influenced her gridded geometric abstractions; and hwamunseok, handwoven flooring mats.
Over the course of her career, Kang participated in various biennales and museum surveys across the globe, from Gwangju and Shanghai to Venice and the US. In 2023, Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art held the largest institutional solo show of her work, titled “Willow Drum Oriole.” Currently, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is presenting Kang’s oeuvre in the exhibition “Mountain—Hour—Face,” which runs until May 4.
In a social media post, Seoul’s Kukje Gallery paid tribute to Kang: “She has left behind a crucial legacy to Korean contemporary art through her distinctive formal language, reinterpreting Korean traditional concepts and methodologies as well as incorporating narrative elements from her anecdotal and bodily experiences.” The gallery added that her life’s work “will continue to resonate with countless artists to come.”
Annabel Preston is an assistant editor at ArtAsiaPacific.
