Su A Chae is a South Korea-born artist currently living and working in the United States. Her painting navigates questions of identity and belonging through balance, negotiating symmetry and visibility. Before transitioning to art in the United States, Chae worked in accounting academia in South Korea, where she developed an understanding of how accounting systems reduce information asymmetry and moral hazard in capital society. This background informs her examination of asymmetrical balance through paradoxical spatial propositions and form of ambivalence associated with cultural identity. Drawing from lived experience shaped by movement across cultural contexts and subtle references to minhwa, Korean folk painting, Chae employes visual languages that include the interplay of symmetry and asymmetry, patterns, arches, fragmentation, openings and closures, gradation, and molded textures. In her painting, belonging and balance function as ongoing process of resistance and recalibration—one that allows difference, contradiction, and tension to remain active rather than resolved.

Chae holds an MFA in Painting from Indiana University and both an MA and BA in Business from Ewha Womans University in South Korea. She also completed the Tyler School of Art Summer Painting Intensive. Her work has been widely exhibited at venues including the Painting Center, Deanna Evans Projects, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Paradise Palace, 5-50 Gallery, and Wassaic Project in New York; Gross McCleaf Gallery and Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia; the Indianapolis Art Center; and many others across the United States. Her work has been featured on platforms such as Young Space and the Hopper Prize (as a finalist), and in publications including New American Paintings, White Hot Magazine, and I Like Your Work. Chae has participated in residencies at Penland School of Craft, Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Chae is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Arkansas.