Since 2015, Kyung-Me (b. 1991, lives and works in New York, NY) explores potential architectures of the subconscious and how images, objects and memory are intertwined to conjure complex and spiritual spaces. Working predominantly in ink, Kyung-Me creates drawings of labyrinthian spaces which trace the seductive and sinister nature of entrapment structures. She is interested in the invisible architecture of entrapment—from the societal and familial, to the psychological and spiritual.

Pivoting from making drawings of parallel projection to mapping a perspective that produce mirror effects along the centre, Kyung-Me created for the exhibition “Sister” in New York in 2022 a suite of eight lavish drawings set in two distinct institutions: monastery, and geisha lodging home (okiya). The drawings feature female figures that are as solemn and paralysed as the shrouded chambers, flawlessly decorated in order to reveal the uncannily organic that disturbs and collapses. New York-based writer Hiji Nam observed: “These are scenes of innocence and corruption, faith and vanity, with the transformation of a female subject portrayed through human figures or anthropomorphized instruments and architectural features. They are also a repetition and articulation of the artist’s own conflicted relationship to desire and the rigorous demand for perfection, and pose a question of historical specificity: Who mothers?”

For “The House in the Trees” at Kiang Malingue in 2023, Kyung-Me further complicates the haunted anti-ruins by carefully arranging the rooms, juxtaposing Eastern and Western artefacts, relics, curios and furniture pieces from different periods. Named after respective centrepieces — The Mask, The Doll, The Bonsai, The Shrine, The Corridor, The Clocktower, The Slumber, and The Dollhouse, the painstakingly catalogued rooms place a Noh Mask in a Meiji Era Tansu Storage Cabinet behind Frank Llyod Wright Sliding Doors; a Thai Buddha statue set on a Korean chest, lit by American Art Nouveau Tiffany lamps; Victorian fretwork in front of a Chinese lacquer cabinet, found in which are Ludwigsburg porcelain plates and a Russian nesting doll; a Nigerian Odudua helmet mask atop a 19th Century Edward William Godwin Octogonal Table — the radically eclectic, anachronistic drawings of excess explore horror vacui as much as claustrophobia. Re-imagining time as timelessness in isolated deterritorialised spaces, the exhibition testifies to an ever-vigilant gravity that at once pulls, grounds, spurns and deserts.

Kyung-Me received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2018. Her work has been collected by The Whitney Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Magasin III. Recent shows include: “I, Sunflower”, Bureau, New York, NY (2026); “Sister”, Bureau, New York, NY (2022); “Introverse: Allegory Today”, 80WSE, New York, NY (2022); “Liminal Spaces”, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, 2019; “Coniunctio” with Harry Gould Harvey IV, Bureau, New York, NY (2019); “Poor Thing” with Sydney Shen, Hotel Art Pavilion, Brooklyn (2018); “Copy Kitty”, Selena Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); and “Bad Korean”, 17 Essex Gallery, New York, (2016).

She is the author of two books, Copy Kitty, published by 2dCloud (2020) and Bad Korean, published by Spaceface Books (2016). She also teaches undergraduate and graduate students at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Pacific Northwest College of the Arts, and New York University.