Sun Young Kang is a book and installation artist. Originally from South Korea, Kang resided in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, PA for a decade and currently she is in Buffalo, NY. From small intimate books to room size installations, she uses paper with its duality of strength and delicacy to create physical and conceptual space. Kang received her MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA in 2007, and BFA in Korean Painting from Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, Korea.

Antithetical ideas, although separate and in tension, depend on each other, as do an object and its shadow. Her art centers on something essential to human existence: the presence, indeed the human embodiment, of the antithetical but interrelated ideas of life and death. To explore this, she create both physical and metaphorical spaces ranging from large installations to small intimate books. These spaces reflect on the visible/invisible boundaries, both connecting and separating, involved in all human relationships, social creations, and human existence itself.

Visually, her work is minimal, delicate, and obsessively repetitive. She uses mostly paper with its lightness and strength, thread, and light, and shadow as metaphors of duality and inseparability. Lights in her work unveil the untouchable and impermanent shadows, suggesting the opposite side of the physical world—unsubstantial, but conceptually and fundamentally real. She is drawn to using motion sensors for their ability to evoke in an audience a sense of being both actor and acted upon, encouraging them—in their creation of a space that envisions the boundary between the antithetical ideas of light and shadows— to dwell in uncertainty.