Kyung-Me’s Sunflowers Mark a Sharp Turn From Her Labyrinthine Drawings
A single encounter with The Tale of Genji changed Kyung-Me’s practice for more than a decade. After seeing 12th-century illustrations for the Japanese classic, the artist became absorbed in drawing and spent 12 years building black-and-white line works that used one-point perspective to pull the viewer deep into enclosed interiors.
Those drawings were exacting and immersive. In works such as The Marriage (2022), The Profession (2022), and Papillon de Nuit VI (2019), rooms seem to extend beyond their frames: Gothic moldings repeat into the distance, tatami mats are rendered with painstaking hatching, and brick floors become grids that feel almost endless. The scenes are small in scale, but visually expansive.
Over time, though, the method that had once felt revelatory began to weigh on her. Kyung-Me realized she had spent years depicting women isolated inside labyrinthine rooms, and that the repetition was shaping her own life as much as her images. She stayed inside for long stretches, and the strain eventually became physical as well, leaving her arm in pain from overuse.
That discomfort pushed her toward a different medium. She took a painting class and found herself drawn to the philosophy of her teacher, Sungsook Setton, who framed Asian painting as a practice of clearing the mind, attending to the breath, and balancing opposing energies. Kyung-Me began with ink abstractions, then moved into color. Yellow came first, and soon the sunflower became her central form.
The result is a striking reversal. Her new paintings, on view at Bureau gallery in New York this summer, are loose watercolor-and-ink sunflowers that favor speed, risk, and release over precision. Kyung-Me said she may make 50 paintings and discard all but one, a process that asks her to let go of shame about waste and the fear of making something ugly.
What remains is work that feels less sealed off than her drawings, and more open to contradiction. In place of the earlier interiors’ quiet confinement, the sunflowers carry a sense of motion and instability — a reminder that artistic reinvention can begin with the decision to stop perfecting what no longer fits.
