SUNyoung Hwang
Artist Profile
Sunyoung Hwang is a London-based painter whose work emerges from an intense and intuitive process of layering, erasure and reconstruction. Her canvases are built through the repeated application and removal of paint, allowing surfaces to accumulate traces of gesture, hesitation and revision.
Rather than illustrating narrative, Sunyoung Hwang’s paintings operate as psychological terrains. Marks surface and dissolve, colours collide and retreat, creating compositions that feel suspended between presence and disappearance. The resulting images suggest sedimented memory — fragments of thought and emotion embedded within the paint itself.
This cyclical method of building and scraping back gives Sunyoung Hwang work a sense of excavation. Layers function almost archaeologically, revealing earlier decisions beneath the surface. The paintings hold tension between control and surrender, coherence and fragmentation, embodying the fluid, often contradictory nature of internal experience.
Sunyoung Hwang completed her BFA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2012 before undertaking an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2016. Since then, she has exhibited in the UK and internationally in group and solo contexts focused on contemporary abstraction and expanded painting practices. Her work has been included in exhibitions in London and Seoul, contributing to cross-cultural dialogues around materiality and gesture in painting.
Across her practice, Sunyoung Hwang continues to explore painting as a site where memory, intuition and material process intersect.
