Artist Statement

My paintings examine balance and belonging as active, ongoing negotiations rather than static ideals. My approach is shaped by my background in accounting academia in South Korea, where I studied how accounting systems manage information asymmetry, disclosure, and moral hazard. These concerns continue to shape my exploration of connection, separation, and the conditions through which belonging is negotiated.

Working with molded surfaces on canvas, I construct compositions through layered patterns and mirrored forms, including arches, zippers, grids, and lattice structures that initially suggest order and coherence. I then complicate these seemingly stable structures through misalignments, fragments, and apertures. These partial reveals and blocked passages underscore that visibility, like belonging, is conditional and negotiated.

I also draw on Korean cultural memory, particularly tiger imagery from minhwa (traditional Korean folk painting). Simplified, fragmented, and repeated, these forms persist without resolving into a singular narrative or fixed meaning.

Rooted in the experience of living between cultures, these paintings consider belonging as an ongoing process of adjustment, translation, and exchange. Rather than describing a fixed identity or stable position, they embrace uncertainty as a productive space of relation. Balance, in my work, is not stillness. It is sustained.

Bio

Su A Chae is a South Korea-born artist based in the United States, whoes paintings explore balance and belonging. She holds an MFA in Painting from Indiana University Bloomington and MA and BA degrees in Business from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally 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; CICA Museum in South Korea; and numerous other institutions and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. Her work has received recognition through the 21c Museum Hotel Northwest Arkansas Artadia Award, for which she was selected as a finalist, and through the International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Asian Art, where she received First and Third Place awards. Her work has been featured by platforms such as Young Space and The Hopper Prize, where she was a finalist, and in publications including New American Paintings, Whitehot 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. She is currently Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Arkansas.