Kwon Sun Young 권선영

Kwon Sun Young is a Korean painter whose collage-based practice explores the emotional collisions that arise, often without clear cause, within ordinary daily life. Her guiding premise is that an individual cannot exist apart from their relationships with others, and her work sets out to visually and gently unpack the communication between the self and the outside world. Collage, for Kwon, brings reality directly into painting: cross-sections of a reality that is bluntly in contact with others become material, mixed on the surface with other images to compose the picture. Through the act of cutting, images stripped of their original knowledge and value are transferred onto the canvas and blended with other fragments, so that a piece's original meaning becomes ambiguous — sometimes losing its form entirely, sometimes combining with other images to take on new meaning.

She holds a Ph.D. from the College of Design at Myongji University (2020), an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2010), and a degree in Painting from Hongik University's College of Fine Arts (2007), and graduated from the Department of Western Painting at Seoul Arts High School in 2003. She has taught drawing and painting at Myongji University, Hongik University, and Daegu Arts University. In 2020 she received the Excellence Award at the Namdo Culture Foundation Art Competition, and her work is held in the collections of Hoban Construction, Seoul Asan Hospital, and Shinhan Bank, among others.