EmBer Eunwoo Byun
Ember Eunwoo Byun is a Korean visual artist based in New York. She studied traditional Korean painting in South Korea, where she developed a strong foundation in painting materials and techniques, and later earned her BA in Studio Art from Hunter College in New York City. Working primarily in painting, she uses a range of materials, including watercolor and oil, to translate personal memories and experiences into visual imagery.
Her work explores the weight of human life and the body, as well as the traces left behind through repetitive acts of labor and everyday life. Drawing from family memories, ordinary gestures, and objects that carry signs of human presence, she seeks to evoke the existence of people without directly depicting the human figure. Through her practice, Byun explores how intimate and personal memories can connect to broader, shared experiences of being human.
Artist Statement
The world cannot be perceived all at once. Within endlessly expanding time and space, in conversations with unfamiliar people, and in the words I encounter for the first time, there is always a sense of distance. As an outsider in reality, even the most ordinary moments must pass through sound, tone, and surface before I can begin to understand them. I think of this delayed perception between the world and myself as a “buffer.”
This buffer exists between reality and the virtual, between direct experience and mediated experience; it is both something that envelops me and a kind of cushion. My work explores the scenes glimpsed through this gap, along with the sensation of never fully reaching them. In this process, the world oscillates between understanding and misunderstanding, ultimately remaining in a state of incomplete perception.
