‘Visionary Artist and Educator’ Suki Seokyeong Kang Has Died at 48
Kang’s gallery said she leaves behind a body of work reframing traditional Korean art forms that will resonate with generations to come. Save to My Ocula
Suki Seokyeong Kang, famous for her recontextualising of traditional Korean art practices, has died at the age of 48.
The Seoul-born conceptual artist died on Sunday after living with cancer for years.
Tina Kim Gallery, Kang’s representative in New York, said she was known to push formal boundaries in a multifaceted practice notable for ‘bridging the traditional and contemporary with remarkable sensitivity’.
Kang’s Korea-based representative Kukje Gallery spoke of her influence, saying she ‘left behind a crucial legacy to Korean contemporary art through her distinctive formal language’.
Kang was known for upcycling traditional Korean forms into conceptual sculptures meditating on individual limits.
Among these were the Joseon Dynasty grid-based music notation system jeongganbo and the court dance chunaengmu which constrained female dancers to move within a small mat—a tradition Kang reframed to address the contexts and conditions of individual lives.
Speaking with Ocula about one such performance (Black Mat Oriole) in 2018, Kang explained: ‘The work is carefully structured with a concern for how each individual can move forward with history, worries, and anxieties that are situated in the vertical time of their existence.’
Her work was featured in the 2016 Gwangju Biennale, followed by the 2018 Shanghai Biennale and Liverpool Biennial. That same year she received Art Basel’s Baloise Art Prize.
Kang went on to present her prize-winning ‘Grandmother Tower’ sculptures—freestanding figures after her grandmother’s posture and frame in her final days—alongside handwoven chunaengmu rush mats in the 2019 Venice Biennale.
In 2023, Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art dedicated a significant survey to her practice, featuring Kang’s sculptures alongside videos, installations, paintings, and poetry.
The artist’s largest U.S. exhibition to date, Mountain–Hour–Face, is on view at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver until 4 May. —[O]
Main image: Exhibition view: Suki Seokyeong Kang, Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2 May–15 June 2024). Courtesy the artist and Tina Kim Gallery. Photo: Hyunjung Rhee.
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