Sueyon Hwang explores the conditions through which the body is formed as material and corporeality mediate one another. Her work begins with an awareness of the forces of social structures that extend far beyond the individual, alongside sensations of anxiety, the pressures and balances experienced by the body, and the resulting processes of material transformation. Form is understood as a provisional state that emerges through the interplay of relationships and time, a perspective that is continually rearticulated throughout her practice. At the intersections of fragility and solidity, affirmation and negation, support and collapse, she reveals the interaction between body and structure through shifting material states, while investigating the movement of meaning and the possibilities of relationality that arise within them.
Her Paper Body, Paper Face series consists of hollow structures made by cutting and assembling paper. These forms sustain their own volume within a thin and fragile material condition, maintaining an incomplete state. The individual pieces, which resemble one another, share schematics and reference common forms, generating a collective flow while persisting through modes of endurance and support within fragility. In this way, the works embody the intensity, humor, and harshness inherent in living within social structures.