Seung Ah Paik: Floating Islands

About the exhibition

The figure in Seung Ah Paik's paintings is the artist's own body, yet it is not a self-portrait. Gladstone describes the body being taken apart and treated as a collection of objects, seen from several shifting viewpoints at once, so that it reads as both familiar and strange.

The show gathers large multi-panel paintings from the ongoing Self Configuration series. The one the gallery has published, Indian Yellow Island 1 (2026), joins two panels into a work 200 by 260 centimeters, in pigment, charcoal and rabbit-skin glue on cotton calico. A pale body lies across a saturated yellow ground.

The show is at the gallery's new two-floor Hannam-dong space, designed by Minsuk Cho and Mass Studies.

About the artist

Seung Ah Paik (b. 1979, Seoul) lives in Pittsburgh. Paik studied Oriental painting at Seoul National University, fashion design at Central Saint Martins and fine art at Goldsmiths (MFA, 2012). Recent exhibitions include the Rubell Museum in Miami (2025) and Bortolami in New York (2026).

Sources: Gladstone: Floating Islands