K-Interview: Soyoung Kwon (Contemporary Artist)

Interviewer: Pooja Vishwanathan (Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India)

Editor: Prachi Vaid (Delhi, India)

Meet Soyoung Kwon 권소영, a contemporary artist based in Seoul, South Korea, who primarily works in ceramics and painting. Her work carries immense profundity, speaking volumes about nature, memory, and sensory experience. In the rush of the modern world, people often overlook small things and their existence. Soyoung strives to capture this through her landscape paintings, especially the characteristics that may seem invisible but can be felt. But not in the literal sense. Instead, she reconstructs them through emotion, time, and memory. Her pieces reflect subtlety and minute details like air, wind, sound, and atmosphere rather than just visuals. 

Soyoung Kwon’s techniques differ from what we imagine. Her paintings linger, leaving emotions and a sense that invites us to savor the experience. She uses countless tiny ink dots, producing a subdued feeling that then comes together to form a masterpiece that changes the tonal perspective. The dots build layered textures and shifting styles, giving her work a composed yet powerful energy. Her materials often include ink, water, and hanji, creating a balance between control and randomness and capturing fleeting moments and feelings. 

Her art and philosophy are less about what you see and more about what you feel. She aims to offer a quiet escape from busy modern life and let viewers experience a kind of emotional stillness or refuge. 

Having participated in international art fairs like Art Toronto and others, Soyoung’s work is collected and shown through galleries and online platforms like Artsy. Her paintings are what we call healing and contemplation. There’s a stillness in them that slows you down without asking. You don’t really “look” at her work; you spend time with it.

In this interview, Soyoung Kwon shares how her process unfolds, what draws her back to these quiet landscapes, and the thoughts that shape her work.

Could you please introduce yourself to all our readers and to the people who are not yet familiar with your work? 

I am Soyoung Kwon, a contemporary ink artist based in Seoul, South Korea. Working primarily with ink and water on hanji, traditional Korean paper, I translate into painting the sensations,  memories, and subtle presences that stay with me after I encounter nature. My work begins with landscapes, but it is not about reproducing scenery as it appears. I am drawn to what lingers beyond visible forms: the moment light appears and disappears, the faint trembling left after wind passes, the quiet air I feel before forests and seas, and the layers of memory that remain within me over time. 

On hanji, ink spreads, sinks in, dries, and accumulates again. Through this process, intention and chance, emptiness and accumulation coexist, gradually forming an inner landscape. I explore how things that cannot be easily seen, yet are deeply present, can take form as traces. I hope my paintings offer viewers more than an image of nature. I hope they become a quiet space where one can pause and encounter one’s own sensations, memories, and inner stillness.

How did your journey into art begin, and what drew you toward creating these quiet, atmospheric landscapes?

My journey into art began with the act of looking at nature for a long time. At first, I was interested in drawing the landscape in front of me: its forms, textures, and changes of light. But over time, nature became more than a subject to depict. It began to awaken deep sensations and memories within me. 

One of the most profound shifts came when I was saying goodbye to my grandmother. It had been raining heavily, but at one moment, the sky opened, and light poured through. I did not experience that light simply as a natural phenomenon. It felt as if the presence of someone who had left was briefly lingering in the light, invisibly reaching to me. 

Since then, I have come to see nature differently. Light, wind, air, and the changing sky are no longer just backgrounds to a scene. They have become carriers of memory, emotion, and presences that cannot be seen. This is why I am drawn to quiet, atmospheric landscapes. Their stillness does not feel empty to me; it feels like a deep space where what has disappeared and what remains, what is visible and invisible, slowly coexist.

Your work often feels reflective and layered with a range of emotions. How do you approach that method when creating a new artwork?

When I begin a new work, I do not decide on a specific emotion in advance. Instead, I slowly return to a landscape or a moment that has stayed within me, and try to sense what kind of temperature, air, and light it still carries. A painting may begin from a visible scene, but as the process unfolds, that scene passes through memory, emotion, and time, gradually becoming an inner landscape. 

In my process, I pay close attention to the time of ink and water as they spread, seep into, and dry on hanji. Rather than completing an image at once, I build the painting through repeated small traces and thin layers. Intentional marks, accidental stains, empty spaces, and newly formed densities overlap with one another, creating emotional depth.  In my work, emotion is not a direct expression, but more like a mood that slowly settles into the surface.

Feelings such as sorrow, longing, calmness, or wonder are present, but they are not fixed into a single form. I hope they remain in the painting as quiet, lingering sensations, like the afterglow of light or the trace left after wind has passed.

Last year, you held your solo exhibition “Passing Through One Another” from October to November in Seoul. How did this title come up, and what do you think stayed with you, or with viewers, after experiencing the work?

The title “Passing Through One Another” came from my belief that no being exists completely separate or alone. While spending a long time observing nature, I have felt that everything in this world touches, passes through, and leaves traces on one another. Wind is invisible, yet it moves through all living things. Light allows what is disappearing to remain for a moment, and the sea,  while constantly changing, becomes a mirror that reflects our inner world. 

This exhibition was not so much a record of nature I had simply observed, but a record of the time in which nature entered, moved, and passed through me. I did not see the sea, wind, and light merely as elements of a landscape, but as sensory languages that connect one existence to another. Through them, the boundary between myself and the world became softer, and I came to sense more clearly that different beings are connected in invisible ways. 

What stayed with me most after the exhibition was the thought that even a passing moment is never insignificant. Even a brief encounter can remain as a deep resonance within someone. I hope that for viewers, my work became more than an experience of looking at a landscape; I hope it offered a quiet moment to encounter the traces of memories and emotions that have passed through their own lives. 

Jeju Island is known for its serene atmosphere, including must-visit spots for tourists. You’ve also mentioned Jeju being quite transformative for you in several ways. Why does it hold a special place in your heart, and how is Jeju related to your craft?

Jeju became a very important turning point in my work. In 2024, I spent about seventy days living and working by the sea in Sehwa, Jeju. I looked at the same sea every day, but it never had the same face. Some days it was calm, some days it was rough, and some days it shimmered endlessly while holding the light. In front of those changes, I felt that I was not only observing nature, but also looking into my own inner state. 

The time I spent in Jeju opened my senses in a very delicate way. The color of the sea, the direction of the wind, the humidity, the movement of clouds, and the light entering the forest began to feel completely new to me. In the Gotjawal forest, there were moments when light, air, the smell of moist earth, and the density of plants seemed to enter my body all at once. Nature was no longer just a landscape to be seen; it became a living sensation to be received through the whole body. 

During that period, I kept a drawing diary almost every day, and I wrote as much as I drew. Those records were not simply sketches or notes, but a way of holding the traces that nature left within me. Since then, the sea, wind, light, and forest have become more than subjects in my work. They have become important languages through which I explore memory, reflection, and the relationships between beings. Jeju taught me how to look at nature more deeply, and how to slowly transform those sensations into painting. 

Your work often feels closely tied to “memory” in many ways. When you begin a piece, what part does “memory” play in it, and what does your process look like as it slowly comes together?

Memory is a very important starting point in my work, but I do not think of it as a way to restore a past scene exactly as it was. To me, memory is a process in which sensation and emotion mix with time, become blurred, and remain in a different density. The light, air, temperature, and subtle vibration I felt in front of a landscape do not completely disappear; they stay quietly within me. When I begin a painting, I sometimes refer to photographs, drawings, or written notes. But they are not materials for simple reproduction. They are more like passages that allow me to return to the sensation of that moment. 

What matters to me is not only how a place looked, but why it remained within me, and what kind of feeling it brings back after time has passed. The process of completing a painting resembles the way memory remains. The original image gradually softens, and a new landscape emerges through the spreading and layering of ink, the empty spaces, and the accumulated traces. In this sense, the landscapes in my work are not exact records of specific places, but forms of memory that have passed through time and sensation.

You use materials such as ink, water, and hanji. What do these mean to you, and how do they influence your painting?

I continue to work with ink painting because, for me, it is not simply a technique of expression, but the deepest language through which I see and think about the world. Ink may appear to be a single shade of black, yet within it exist countless tonal variations, depths, light and darkness, and layers of time and emotion. In that sense, I do not experience ink as a limited material, but as an infinite language capable of holding even invisible sensations. Nature is never fixed for even a moment. A landscape constantly changes according to light, wind, clouds, humidity, and the movement of air. I feel that this resembles the way ink seeps and spreads across hanji. Before I can fully control it, ink moves with water, enters the paper, and creates unexpected depths and empty spaces. 

Hanji is a living surface that receives all of these movements. Ink and water do not simply remain on the surface; they sink deeply into the paper and form layers over time. Within this process, intention and chance, appearance and disappearance, emptiness and accumulation all work together. While working with these materials, I feel that I am not only painting nature, but also experiencing again the way nature changes, stays, and breathes. For me, ink painting is a practice of receiving what cannot be completely grasped. I believe ink is the quietest and most profound language through which I can hold those presences.

By using countless tiny ink dots, you create paintings that incorporate often-overlooked elements. What major themes do you primarily focus on, and how does this technique come to fruition in the end? 

In my work, repeated small dots, lines, and traces of ink are not simply techniques. They are like particles of sensation, the smallest units through which I sense nature. Rather than seeing nature only as a large landscape, I spend time with the subtle changes that are easily overlooked: the trembling left after wind passes, the place where light has stayed and disappeared, the air between leaves, or the small movement on the surface of the sea. 

The major themes I focus on are nature, memory, time, and the subtle resonance that occurs between beings. By accumulating countless dots and lines, breath by breath, I try to allow fleeting sensations to remain again within the painting. A single dot may be small and quiet, but when repeated and layered, it creates a density of time and emotional depth. In the end, these dots no longer remain only as individual marks. They connect, spread, and overlap, becoming air, light, forest, sea, or an inner landscape.

I hope these small traces reveal the presence of things that cannot be easily seen. For me, painting is not about explaining a grand scene, but about quietly holding what disappears, what trembles subtly, and what nevertheless remains deeply within us. 

We all hit a point where we’ve been working on something for so long that we just get stuck midway. How do you deal with that, and what helps you get out of it? Is there that one thing you turn to when it happens?

When I work, I try not to focus only on completing a result quickly. Instead, I stay with the surface for a long time, repeating gestures and following the sensations within me. In that sense,  the act of painting itself feels close to meditation, and sometimes even to a kind of practice or discipline. Through the process of layering ink, waiting, and looking again, the next trace often opens naturally. Because of this, I rarely feel completely blocked in the middle of a work. 

However, there are times when I begin to long for a new landscape. It happens when I feel that I  have stayed within a familiar sensation for a while, or when I want my gaze to open toward something unfamiliar again. At those moments, rather than forcing an answer inside the studio, I  go hiking or travel into nature. 

When I walk in nature, small changes begin to enter my senses again: the direction of light, the temperature of the wind, the surface of trees, distant mountain ridges, and the colors and air that shift with the seasons. These new experiences and discoveries awaken my senses and bring back the desire to paint. In the end, what I return to is nature. Nature always offers me new questions and opens my senses again, allowing me to look, feel, and return to painting.

Do things around you, like people or places or even small everyday moments, end up finding their way into your work without you even realising it?

Yes, I believe that the people, places, and small everyday moments around me naturally find their way into my work. They do not always appear immediately as clear images. Instead, they pass through me and remain quietly as layers of memory and emotion. A conversation with someone,  the feeling of a place, the light I encounter during a walk, or the changing temperature of the wind as the seasons shift may return later within the surface of a painting. 

Through observing nature for a long time, I have come to feel that relationships in nature resemble human relationships. Trees in a forest may seem to stand separately, but they exist by influencing one another through light, wind, soil, and humidity. The sea is also made of countless waves that meet, scatter, and form one larger flow. I feel that human relationships are similar. We pass by one another, move through one another, sometimes drift apart, yet leave invisible traces on each other. 

So what enters my work is not necessarily the outer appearance of a specific person or place, but the sensation left by that relationship. The resonance of a word, the warmth of time spent together, or a small change in nature may remain within me and later appear as the spreading of ink, repeated dots, empty spaces, or layers of faint light. In the end, I think my painting is a process of slowly accumulating the traces left after the world and its relationships have passed through me.

When people appreciate your paintings or come across them, how do you accept their reactions? What do you hope they take away while observing the paintings?

The reactions of viewers are deeply meaningful to me. When I look back at my early works, I  realize that I was observing nature from a certain distance, focusing mainly on visual impressions. At that time, viewers also seemed to encounter the works as landscapes from afar. They would pause for a moment, but often move on rather quickly. Over time, however, my attitude toward nature began to change. Rather than observing it from a distance, I started to enter it more closely and receive its sensations through my whole body: light, wind, air, humidity, and the depth of the forest. I became less interested in the visible surface of a landscape and more drawn to the deeper pulse within it, the invisible rhythm of life moving beneath. My paintings also began to change toward a closer, more embodied way of breathing with nature. 

As this change happened, I began to notice that viewers spent more time in front of my paintings.  They no longer seemed to look at them only as distant landscapes. Instead, they came closer, both physically and emotionally, slowly following the layers of ink, the small traces, the movement of light, and the empty spaces within the surface. Some viewers told me that my paintings brought back their own memories or emotions. Others simply stayed quietly for a long time. 

I hope viewers do not feel that they have to understand my paintings through one fixed meaning.  Rather, I hope they can stay within them and breathe with them. If my work allows someone to slow down for a moment and quietly encounter their own sensations and memories, that is very meaningful to me. I believe the communication between my paintings and the viewer deepens not through explanation, but through the time spent looking, staying, and breathing together.

Outside of your work and other things, including art, what helps you stay grounded? How do you navigate your everyday life and stick to your roots while keeping yourself engaged?

My everyday life is deeply woven into my work. I do not really think of life and work as completely separate. Going to the studio every day, spending time in front of the surface, layering ink, waiting,  and looking again forms the central rhythm of my life. That rhythm is what keeps me grounded. For me, the studio is not only a place where I work. It is the place where I feel most settled. Even when I rest, I often feel more at ease in the studio than anywhere else. Rather than feeling pressured by this rhythm, I feel steadied by it. Over time, the daily act of returning to the studio has become not only a practice, but a way of living and a quiet standard that holds me from within. 

Of course, the strength to continue does not come only from solitude and concentration. The unconditional love of my family, who have always been on my side, is my deepest root. I am also greatly supported by the people who truly feel, appreciate, and encourage my work, as well as by fellow artists who share this path of making and growing together. In the end, what grounds me is the rhythm of my work and the relationships of love and support around me. Within them, I find the strength to stay connected to my roots, to look at nature again, to feel deeply, and to return to painting. 

What are your future plans? Are you currently working on anything or hoping to explore something new through your work?

In the future, I would like to further develop the relationship between field sketching and studio work. I am interested in how the sensations I receive directly from nature pass through memory and time after I return to the studio, and how they are transformed into painting. For me, field sketching is not simply a preparatory process. It is the first breath through which I sense the world, and an essential beginning of my work. Above all, I feel that I will become even more focused on light, which is the most special presence in my work.

To me, light is not merely something that illuminates an object. It allows what is disappearing to remain for a moment, awakens the presence of what cannot be seen, and quietly connects things that seem separate. I want to explore not only how light appears and disappears in nature, but also how it connects to human memory, emotion, and inner depth. 

In particular, I want to explore more deeply the boundary between what is visible and invisible through light. The light that briefly enters a forest, the faint light that rises within darkness, and the light that stays for a moment on the surface of the sea all raise questions for me about the way existence appears. Light reveals form, but it also opens what lies beyond form. It shows disappearance, yet leaves behind a certain afterglow rather than complete absence. I want to hold that afterglow more delicately within ink painting. 

Ink painting will also continue to expand for me. Ink, water, and hanji are traditional materials, but to me, they are an infinitely open language. Just as nature changes from moment to moment, ink spreads and seeps into hanji, creating an unpredictable world. Through the depth of ink, empty space, repeated small traces, and the space where light seems to remain, I hope to explore not only the outer appearance of nature, but also the sensation of existence and the inner landscape. I am also planning to travel to the United States in September. I am very curious to see what kind of change unfamiliar light, vast land, different air, and new landscapes will bring to me.  New places have always opened my senses again, and I believe this journey will bring another direction and depth to my future work.

And lastly, do you have any message for the people who have supported you over the years?

I would like to sincerely thank everyone who has watched over my work and supported me with such care over the years. I always work with a deep sense of necessity and sincerity. To hold invisible sensations, to let disappearing moments remain within a painting, and to translate inner tremors that cannot be fully explained in words into the language of ink is, for me, both a profound question and an earnest process. That is why it gives me great strength when someone stays in front of my painting and tells me that they found comfort in it, or that it brought back their own memories and emotions. 

In those moments, I realize that the questions I have been holding are not mine alone. The sensations between nature and memory, disappearance and remaining, the visible and the invisible are ultimately connected to all of our lives.   The resonance shared by those who truly feel my work becomes the greatest courage that allows me to return to the studio again. I will continue to face nature and life with sincerity, and with the same earnest heart, I hope to create paintings that are quiet, yet remain for a long time. I hope my work can become a place where someone may pause, find comfort, and meet their own inner world again. Thank you, sincerely.

Once again, we would like to express our heartfelt gratitude for your precious time and for sharing insights about your journey. Thank you so much. On behalf of the entire team at Hallyuism, we wish you all the best for your future projects and lots of love from India!

We hope you all loved reading this interview as much as we loved conducting it. Let us know your thoughts in the comments!