Sun Young Kang
To My Mother, 2020
Artist's own hair embroidered on paper, mounted on wood panel
6 x 12 x 1 1/2 in each panel, a suite of four panels
15.2 x 30.5 x 3.8 cm
15.2 x 30.5 x 3.8 cm
Edition of 2
SK0001
Copyright The Artist
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Hair in Kang's work represents a connection to home, identity and a link between the past and future. Personally, TO MY MOTHER is Kang's response to her mother’s illness: the...
Hair in Kang's work represents a connection to home, identity and a link between the past and future.
Personally, TO MY MOTHER is Kang's response to her mother’s illness: the feeling of being helpless and far away. Her shed hair on the floor reminded Kang of her mother’s battle with breast cancer - losing hair and losing her memories from Alzheimer’s soon after the cancer treatment - and their lost connection. Her mother's memory loss made Kang reflect on the human connections encased in memories and the fragility of the connection. It increased her emotional distance to her past and her home and the tension between the past and the future in which she exists.
Kang stitched each letter onto the paper with her shed hair and mounted the paper onto thick blocks of wood to make both the narratives and hair tangible and permanent.
"The narrative embroidered on each panel is very personal and ephemeral, like the shed hair itself, and they could disappear any moment, as if everything I talk to my mother about is forgotten in seconds."
Shed hair is a metaphor for memory loss, detached self, isolation and disconnection. While shed hair is no longer physically part of a person, it still contains specific biological information. The only difference is in the loss of physical connection. This thought reflects how people relate and connect to each other. As a person living in between two cultures, feeling forever an outsider in either place, this thought also reflects how immigrants are often separated from their families, so that emotional connection is weakened or even lost over time and the people become more isolated from their homeland. Sewing hair into her work is Kang's attempt to reconnect and heal.
Kang's work focuses on the duality fundamental to human existence: of different realities or worlds, both in space and time, the tension between them and of the coexistence of antithetical ideas, how death implies life, how the material realm implies the unsubstantial or nonphysical and how absence implies presence. To explore this, she created both physical and metaphorical spaces, ranging from large installations to small, intimate books. She sees the audience as key to her work - completing it.
Visually, Kang's work is minimal, delicate and obsessively repetitive. She is influenced by the Korean philosophy of Yeo-baek, as well as the monochrome paintings of the Korean Dansaekhwa artists. The materials she uses — mostly paper, thread, her own hair and lights — bear metaphoric meanings. Paper is both light and strong. The shed hair embroidered on paper is both hers and no longer hers.
About the artist -
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 has been recently named as the 2021 UAH Contemporary Art Fellow funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) American Community Grant Program at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. 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. Kang was an Artist in Residence at Coalesce Center for Biological Art at The State University of New York at Buffalo for the 2019-2020 academic year and at Siao-long Cultural Park through COPE NYC International Artists in Residence Exchange Program, Tainan, Taiwan in 2017.
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 resides in the West Collection, Pennsylvania State Museum, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art Franklin Furnace Artist book collection, and numerous libraries’ special collections.
Personally, TO MY MOTHER is Kang's response to her mother’s illness: the feeling of being helpless and far away. Her shed hair on the floor reminded Kang of her mother’s battle with breast cancer - losing hair and losing her memories from Alzheimer’s soon after the cancer treatment - and their lost connection. Her mother's memory loss made Kang reflect on the human connections encased in memories and the fragility of the connection. It increased her emotional distance to her past and her home and the tension between the past and the future in which she exists.
Kang stitched each letter onto the paper with her shed hair and mounted the paper onto thick blocks of wood to make both the narratives and hair tangible and permanent.
"The narrative embroidered on each panel is very personal and ephemeral, like the shed hair itself, and they could disappear any moment, as if everything I talk to my mother about is forgotten in seconds."
Shed hair is a metaphor for memory loss, detached self, isolation and disconnection. While shed hair is no longer physically part of a person, it still contains specific biological information. The only difference is in the loss of physical connection. This thought reflects how people relate and connect to each other. As a person living in between two cultures, feeling forever an outsider in either place, this thought also reflects how immigrants are often separated from their families, so that emotional connection is weakened or even lost over time and the people become more isolated from their homeland. Sewing hair into her work is Kang's attempt to reconnect and heal.
Kang's work focuses on the duality fundamental to human existence: of different realities or worlds, both in space and time, the tension between them and of the coexistence of antithetical ideas, how death implies life, how the material realm implies the unsubstantial or nonphysical and how absence implies presence. To explore this, she created both physical and metaphorical spaces, ranging from large installations to small, intimate books. She sees the audience as key to her work - completing it.
Visually, Kang's work is minimal, delicate and obsessively repetitive. She is influenced by the Korean philosophy of Yeo-baek, as well as the monochrome paintings of the Korean Dansaekhwa artists. The materials she uses — mostly paper, thread, her own hair and lights — bear metaphoric meanings. Paper is both light and strong. The shed hair embroidered on paper is both hers and no longer hers.
About the artist -
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 has been recently named as the 2021 UAH Contemporary Art Fellow funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) American Community Grant Program at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. 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. Kang was an Artist in Residence at Coalesce Center for Biological Art at The State University of New York at Buffalo for the 2019-2020 academic year and at Siao-long Cultural Park through COPE NYC International Artists in Residence Exchange Program, Tainan, Taiwan in 2017.
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 resides in the West Collection, Pennsylvania State Museum, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art Franklin Furnace Artist book collection, and numerous libraries’ special collections.