Korean artist Suki Seokyeong Kang died in April 2025 at the age of 48. Known for her immersive sculptures, videos and performances, Kang was, the words of her gallerist, Tina Kim, ‘a visionary artist and educator [who] leaves behind a body of work that will resonate with generations to come.’ Four people describe knowing and working with the late artist.
Gala Porras-Kim
I admire Suki’s work and her way of thinking. It has taught me so much about traditional thoughts and forms and how to incorporate them successfully into works in a way that makes aspects of the past feel relevant today. I was a big fan before we met, and when we did meet I was very excited, fangirling and relieved that she was so approachable. We ended up hanging out spontaneously in different parts of the world over the years, but the shape of our friendship seemed to occupy a separate timeframe, so that it felt like a continuous moment, regardless of the time that passed between meetings. When we were together, I felt like we were our best grandpas. With her, I learned how to think about history and tradition and how to recognize them in contemporary life; to identify the essential qualities of something ancient, and understand which parts were circumstantial and could be altered to move someone today. She was so encouraging and realistic in ‘director’s cut’-type conversations where she advised me on how to do practical things as an artist. I’m so glad for the time we had together. When I see and think about her works, I feel as if they are prompting me to have a conversation with her through them, so I’ll be glad to run into them once in a while.
Gala Porras-Kim is an artist. She lives in Los Angeles, USA, and London, UK
Miranda Lash
Suki Seokyeong Kang will be remembered for many reasons, including her elegant approach to incorporating elements from Korea’s art historical past with the concerns of our present. Her artwork surge us to surrender to the beauty of the ‘pause’ as a tool for cultivating an awareness of one’s own being in relation to others. I think of the quiet moments she allowed between claps of the bak, notes of birdsong or stanzas of poems. I recall the careful pauses between movements of the body in her activations (gaps between the slow wave of an armour the bend of a leg), and the exquisite joy of pausing before her artworks to absorb their intricate details. In the ‘Mountain’ sculptures, there is a graceful elision between time as it is experienced by us mere mortals and the deep time of the landscape around us. In Colorado, where admiration for the mountains is already ever present, it was moving to see our visitors respond to these arrestingly streamlined depictions of peaks. In unexpected materials, we witnessed portraits of different seasons and climates in ways that made these meeting places between heaven and earth feel intimate.The mountains became ours.
Miranda Lash is the Ellen Bruss senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, USA. In 2025 she co-curated with Leilani Lynch ‘Suki Seokyeong Kang: Mountain – Hour – Face’ at MCA Denver
Oscar Murillo
We existed in soils of love, mutual respect, care and laughter …
Shared knowledge – our differences, cherished spirits and ancestors met – the studio a hive of active mastery – radically turning ancestry on its head. Dancing!
A grounding star system internal eternal …
Travel served to bridge gaps, but also act as a vessel of spiritual intimacy which upon landing bursts into joy and pure … people, gently a landscape appears – souls
A warm embrace
Mother, child, friend
The studio! Determined – ceaselessly
Cosmos, world, nature, universe – courage!
More laughter … landscape of generosity – love
My Dearest Suki, thank you for your eternal laughter, warmth and friendship – please read this telegram, upon my early morning landing, let’s meet for galbitang.
Oscar Murillo is an artist. He lives in La Paila, Colombia
Lauren Mackler
In 2018, at the Schindler House, amid the bustle of West Hollywood, Suki’s sculptures – a delicate arrangement of disparate forms – teeter with precision. Others, set on wheels, seem ready to cruise. They are immobile, though, fixed in perfect balance – until the video on a monitor on the floor comes into view. In Black Under Coloured Moon (2015), two performers are arranging Suki’s objects around the black rectangle of the screen. This bearing-less space reminds me of Derek Jarman, who described his own velvety backdrop as the ‘black without end, that lurks behind a blue sky’. And it is against this pregnant void – that fertile, interstellar space out of which planets are forged – that Suki stages her carefully crafted objects; steel skeletons wrapped in thread (for ‘friction’ she says) or flawlessly painted. Her actors (one, perhaps, recognisable to Korean viewers from a soap) are personifying a Goryeo-era poem called ‘Love at the Dumpling Shop’. The result is abstract. Suki’s ‘black under’ is a ‘timeless space’ where the two figures never meet. It is also a surrogate for the jeongganbo; a precise traditional Korean notation system that places rhythm, pitch and movement into a grid, allowing language, sound and gesture to be read simultaneously – essentially spatializing time. Within her grid, Suki’s pastel-coloured objects are stacked and disassembled to make shapes, like an alphabet, and the figures become a language too.
Suki’s work reflects a commitment to tradition as it underpinned her daily life, and a sense that by collapsing the two she could embed an idea into an object, deconstruct the structures of her world and hone her focus on how the individual works within the whole. Through the rigor of her thought and the devotional quality of her craft, she alchemized materials into a new metric – a non-linear, non-worldly time, that draws the past into the present.
Lauren Mackler is a curator based in Los Angeles, USA. In 2018, she included Suki Seokyeong Kang’s work in ‘Public Fiction: The Conscientious Objector’ at MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, USA
