This sculpture belongs to Suki Seokyeong Kang’s Grandmother Tower series, in which each sculpture looks dangerously close to tipping over, but somehow manages to remain balanced. This series of work was originally started by the artist as a way to depict her grandmother’s posture before her passing. As the artist stated, “I perceived her body as a frame that only refers to her form in a beautifully humorous way…Despite her elegant figure, I remember that she did not have enough energy to stand on her own and needed to lean on something. The piled objects are made in the same height as my grandmother and stand by friction created by the threads wrapped around them; the thread covering up colors and leathers on the surface produce more friction between the units.” (Artist’s interview with Jeppe Ugelvig for PIN-UP, 2018).

Each Grandmother Tower offers a layered narrative through the tension between balance and imbalance. As curator Jay Jungin Hwang writes in his essay, “Kang quells the shakiness of the vertical tower by placing sheets of leather and cloth in between the blocks to add friction and support. Where there is instability, she finds a way to stabilize. In a situation of imbalance, she looks for some sort of a rule or pattern and uses it to build a balanced harmony… If we accept that the tensions and clashes arising from combinations of diverse things are apt reflections of our lives, the art of Suki Seokyeong Kang is a metaphor for life in general as well as a tangible representation of how she flexibly deals with conflicts and discord in her life by turning them into play.”