Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
Suh approaches form not as image, but as weight, trace, and residue. Working across oil and charcoal on dyed linen, and watercolor and charcoal pencil on cardboard, her practice considers how form emerges through pressure, accumulation, and partial erasure. Rather than presenting stable figures, the work sustains a condition in which forms remain unsettled and in flux.
The drawing series, of which Folding, Resisting is a part, shifts toward gesture. Folded, pressed, and condensed, the forms register variations in posture and pressure. Made on cardboard and affixed with duct tape, the drawings emphasize immediacy and instability. Each gesture suggests a form turning inward, where movement occurs through compression, contact, and sustained tension rather than release.
Across both bodies of work, form resists containment. Boundaries cannot fully hold; shapes blur, overlap, and extend beyond themselves. What emerges is not a fixed image, but a shifting presence, continuously formed and undone.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Daun Suh is a South Korean painter based in Chicago. Her work investigates the unstable boundary between presence and disappearance. Her images hover between bodily form and spatial atmosphere, structured by dark tonal fields that allow forms to emerge and recede without fully resolving. Working with oil and charcoal on hand-dyed linen and canvas, as well as acrylic and pastel on wood panels, she develops her surfaces through layering, erasure, and revision, sustaining a condition of perceptual ambiguity. Suh received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from Kookmin University in Seoul. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Chase Gallery at Epiphany Center for the Arts, Zhou B Art Center, and Bodock Gallery in Chicago. Her practice has been recognized in New American Paintings (Midwest Issue) and Visual Art Journal, and includes a featured interview in AATONAU.
© Daun Suh