Su A Chae
is a South Korean visual artist, currently based in the Midwestern United States. She received an MFA in Painting from Indiana University Bloomington and an MA and a BA in Business from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, the Painting Center in New York, the Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, the Harrison Center in Indianapolis, Indiana University in Bloomington, Young Space and others. Her work has been appeared in print including Studio Visit, Create! Magazine, Maake, Friend of The Artist, Herald-Times, and others. She was an artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, attended a painting workshop at Penland School of Craft as a recipient of the Higher Education Partner Program Scholarship, and completed the Tyler School of Art Summer Painting & Sculpture Intensive. Su A Chae has been recently selected as a finalist for the Hopper Prize.
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Artist Statement
My painting investigates the ambivalence associated with identity and asymmetrical balance that creates paradoxical spatial propositions.
I employ (semi-)abstraction as a means of extracting
my cultural and autobiographical—often intertwined
with social and political—identity. The grids, squares, and patterns serve as a vehicle for describing separation, interference, confrontation, and tension, as well as an underlying structure. The lattice or checkerboard-like structures that resemble a fence or a gate speak of a physical, psychological or cultural barrier that I have experienced since I moved to the United States. The rectangles are simplified but non-universal visual information that contains my personal and cultural perceptional experience.
Grounded on my belief that art can be a remedy to counteract the effects of social imbalance, I use asymmetrical balance of shapes, patterns, colors, and textures to deliberately create paradoxical spatial propositions. An organic, microbiological, or cosmological quality frequently appears in my paintings as a marker of personal and cultural memory and as well as a counterbalance to rigidity embedded within my paintings. I intend the gentle and tempting colors accompanying with wild and agitating elements to invite the viewers to the enigmatic mindscape where they see their own multi-layered images as reality.
As a Xennial who has had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood, I tend to make a painting that looks digital but still remains the materiality. While maintaining the physicality, my paintings where gradational colors are paired with textural surfaces chase the digital aura.
The tension and ambiguity between the micro and the macro, the interior and the exterior, and the illusionary and the material within a paradoxical space interrogates about what it is what we see. I hope to open up a larger conversation of diversity and coexistence in social context. My paintings allow the rigid structures to be the places of human possibility rather than suppression within these structures live anger, anxiety, playfulness, and hope, and the possibility.
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approach to my art practice with the interest in the digital media.) I am ready to go back to my studio barn to infuse the vitality and the materiality into my digital studies that I have made by producing physical paintings.
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Tutu: What inspires you the most right now?
Su: Deglobalization and connectivity, individuality and solidarity, and relationship between humans and nature are what I am thinking of right now. The pandemic allows me to have more time to read a variety of books. In particular, I am reading again some classics, dystopian novels, and history books that I enjoyed reading many years ago, such as the works by Dante, Albert Camus, Jonathan Swift, Aldous Huxley, José Saramago, Jered Diamond and others. As we seek to grasp our past’s lessons for our future, I am reading those books to gain insights into this uncertain circumstances and, hopefully, the future. Besides reading alone at home, I am attending a book club via Zoom to meet my friends and to discuss books. We are currently reading a survival story of a young boy in the wilderness, that can inspire us to have hope and resilience in a challenging situation. Reading books not only helps me experience and analyze the world through others’ lives but also foster and practice imagination. I am seeking to visualize what I’ve read, thought, and questioned in the form of painting.