Bohyeon Hwang

Bohyeon Hwang is a South Korean artist whose painting practice explores the tension between proximity and distance—between the material surface of things and the elusive meanings they may withhold. Working across discarded canvases, layered pigments and drawn textures, Hwang constructs works that blur the boundary between the tactile and the imagined. Her images are not so much representations of objects as they are responses to the emotional life of objects—fragments, residues, and overlooked matter that return as visual echoes.

At the heart of her practice lies an interest in how things survive transformation—how the texture of a velvet cloth, the hollow of a box, or a torn scrap of paper might retain traces of presence even when their use, function, or name has disappeared. Hwang collects and redraws digital images of objects she encounters both in real life and online, often transforming them into near-phantasmic forms. Her canvases are built through acts of layering, scraping, sanding, and stitching. These gestures do not conceal the painting’s surface—they reveal it as a site of memory, loss, and quiet resistance.

Informed by philosophical enquiries—particularly Heidegger’s notion of the “readiness-to-hand” of tools—Hwang reflects on how objects are encountered not as symbols, but as companions in the unfolding of daily life. Her works dwell in this in-between space: emotionally near, yet conceptually distant. They speak in the language of surfaces—cracked, rubbed, knotted—yet never flatten into decorative gesture. Instead, they ask how love, attention, and meaning might persist in things cast aside.

Hwang completed an MFA in Painting at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, following previous degrees from Ewha Womans University (BFA/MFA, Seoul). She has exhibited in the Netherlands and Korea, including the group exhibition at the Royal Award for Modern Painting (Palace Amsterdam).