Suki Seokyeong Kang, Immersive Artist, Has Died Aged 48

Suki Seokyeong Kang, the Korean artist known for her immersive sculptures, videos and performances, has died at the age of 48. In an email announcing her passing, Tina Kim Gallery described Kang as ‘a visionary artist and educator [who] leaves behind a body of work that will resonate with generations to come.’

Born in Seoul in 1977, Kang studied traditional ink painting at Ewha Womans University, where she received a BFA in 2000 and an MFA in 2002. She later earned an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 2012. ‘This dual grounding informed her unique vision for the role of an artist as a choreographer of space and memory,’ the gallery said. Kang’s work, which combined historical techniques with contemporary materials, was known for its complexity and rigour.

In 2018, she debuted a significant body of work at ICA Philadelphia and the Liverpool Biennial as part of her ‘Jeong’ series (2014–2025), inspired by jeongganbo – a 15th-century musical notation system developed under King Sejong the Great, who also created Hangul, the Korean alphabet. The notation system divides tones into gridded boxes, or jeong, designed for ease of learning and clarity. Writing in frieze, Evan Moffitt observed: ‘As spaces of both limitation and possibility, jeong seem like ideal units for a conceptual artist who transmits complex information through mute material.’ Kang’s sculptures, he noted, were ‘fastidiously padded with bits of leather, tightly bound with coloured threads or smoothly painted in fleshy tones,’ expressing ‘a kind of beautiful bondage’ between material constraint and movement.

Later that year, Kang was awarded the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel for her ‘Grandmother Tower’ (2011—25) series, which brought greater international recognition. ‘These sculptures,’ wrote Park Han-sol in The Korea Times, ‘with their gracefully hunched postures, are an abstract portrait of her own grandmother during her final days. By carefully stacking round steel frames wrapped in thread, Kang constructs a delicate skeleton that maintains its own balance.’

From 2009 until her death, Kang exhibited widely, including Tina Kim Gallery (New York), Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles), MUDAM (Luxembourg), Kukje (Seoul) and Massimo De Carlo (Paris). Her work was featured in the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), and in group shows such as ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’ (2012), the Gwangju Biennale (2016, 2018), and ‘The Shape of Time: Korean Art After’ 1989 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2023). That same year, she opened a major solo exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, drawing on gagok – a classical Korean genre of song evoking the movement and sound of orioles. The show, described by frieze critic Hayoung Chung as a ‘heterogeneous landscape,’ spanned multiple levels of the museum.

In a interview with The Korea Times, Kang said the Leeum’s collection of sansuhwa – Korean landscape painting – which had inspired her as a student gained new significance after her cancer diagnosis. ‘While reflecting on these matters, a series of significant life events unfolded, including childbirth and my battle with cancer,’ she said. ‘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.’

Earlier this year, Kang opened her largest U.S. exhibition to date, ‘Mountain – Hour – Face’, at MCA Denver.

_{Main image: Suki Seokyeong Kang, Mat Black Mat #20-49 (detail), 2020, woven dyed Hwamunseok, thread, painted steel, 160 × 125 cm. Courtesy: © Suki Seokyeong Kang and Pace Gallery}