When the paper talks
- Sun Young creates artists' books and large-scale paper installations
- She works with materials for their symbolic resonance as well as their physical duality
- Her practice explores the dualities fundamental to human existence
After studying Korean painting in Korea, Sun Young Kang moved to the USA intending to continue painting. At the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, she discovered book arts and became drawn to paper as an expressive material. “I was more drawn to paper impressed with black ink than to canvases covered with strong and colourful paint,” she says. Paper, Sun Young discovered, held a duality she would return to throughout her practice at once fragile and strong, light and structural, intimate and monumental. Today, she works across artist's books, sculptural paper works, and large-scale installations, exploring how materials themselves can carry meaning. “I believe artists and artisans must have humanity. Without empathy for the suffering of the world, an artwork becomes merely a product,” Sun Young says.
Discover her work
INTERVIEW
To take In Between Presence and Absence/Dinnertime as an example, I begin by collecting discarded paper and recycling it into pulp to create new sheets. Before they fully dry, I cast them on moulds to form small bottles or bowl-shaped objects. I then gather hundreds or thousands of these paper casts to construct large-scale installation environments.
Materials play a central role in my work. They have metaphoric meaning that shapes my work as much as any image or colour could. Paper, thread, my own shed hair, light and shadow: each holds its own duality. I rarely use imagery or colour directly. Instead, I combine the inherent meaning of materials with repetitive gestures in the making process.
Artist and retired professor Susan Viguers, my graduate mentor, has a major influence on my work. She taught me how to express abstract or complex ideas, things that cannot easily be conveyed through images or form, through writing and storytelling. It continues to shape the foundation of my artistic practice today.
Growing up in Korea and building my career in the USA, I have always lived between two worlds, belonging fully to neither, residing at the edge of both. The tension between spaces, the coexistence of antithetical ideas, the sense that one world always implies another: these are not just themes I chose for my work, but experiences I have lived.
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