Hyun Ae Kang is a famous contemporary artist from South Korea. She is a follower of the South Korean creative style dansaekhwa, or "monochrome painting," whose practitioners were defined by the multi-layered texture of their works and a spiritual approach to creating art. But Hyun Ae Kang moves away from monochrome and continues to create abstract paintings.
Kang explores the interplay between the theoretical and the natural through elements of sculpture. Pure geometric shapes, such as the sphere or cube, unfurl into amorphous forms whose irregularity evokes a sense of the primordial. Similarly, the uncanny smoothness of polished stone or bronze is disrupted by craggy patches resembling biomatter. Even Kang’s choice in mediums is an interrogation of the two seemingly oppositional concepts; by juxtaposing burnished bronze with grainy wood or translucent marble with impenetrable obsidian, Kang embraces material alterity to achieve visual harmony.
Hyun Ae Kang was born in 1959, in Korea, where she received both her BFA and MFA in sculpture from the prestigious Ewha Womans University. Kang's artworks are in the permanent collections of the Art Museum of Seoul, the Muzeo Museum and Cultural Center in Anaheim, California, and the Brea Museum and Historical Society, in California. She lives and works in California, USA.