Korean-born, Los Angeles-based, Kyong Boon Oh is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice produces immersive, installation-based environments that integrate sculptural craft, reclaimed materials, moving image, and voice along with spiritual practice. Her art—a meditative ritualistic craft shaped by her father’s legacy and her immigrant identity alongside physical illness—maps the complex terrain of assimilation, nostalgia, and belonging. Through her evolving practice, which now includes historical research like 6.25 The Korean War Project and community engagement initiatives like installation Prayers and Flow with Medium workshop, she aspires to reveal personal histories as communal destinies that transcends time and space.
She is a founding member of SSGOC (Stone Sculptors Guild of Orange County). Her studios are located in Orange County, CA. Her work has been exhibited at Crafton Hills College Gallery, Triton Museum of Art, Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, ReflectSpace Gallery in Glendale Central Library, Art Share LA, Launch LA, Korean Cultural Center LA, Huntington Beach Art Center, Marks Art Center, Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, and Lois Lambert Gallery in Santa Monica among others. Her work is currently nominated for Best of the Net in Art and has been featured in LA Times, Flaunt, The Offing, Asbarez, Asia Journal, Pasadena Star News, FUTURO magazine, Art Matters by Edward Goldman, The Korea Daily. She participated in Quinn Emanuel and Ellsworth Artist Residency and has received several grants including Lakers In the Paint Grant and Community Engagement Creative Grant.
ART STATEMENT
Transcendent end is hidden in our own depths, waiting for the chance to occupy a conscious moment. My practice searches for that threshold—where what is buried or dispersed briefly becomes present—and shapes it into sculptural and sonic environments where devotion and labor converge as prayer and meditative ritual.
Weaving influences from handicraft, Expressionism, and personal and historical narratives—rooted in my father’s legacy and my Korean immigrant Christian heritage—I work with traditional, geological, industrial and commercial materials along with the discarded, re-contextualizing overlooked narratives, while projecting possible identities for the marginalized to provide a commentary on redemptive identity. Formally, I use interior-exterior juxtaposition and tangled, infinite structures across subtractive and additive processes—carving negative space in stone and labor-intensive wire weaving—as metaphors of dislocation, assimilation, and desire for belonging. Situated between chaos and order, emotion and meditation, past and present, isolation and community, my work navigates the complex and often uncharted terrain of displacement. Here, the embodied voice and craft labor serve as vessels for what language cannot stabilize: repetition and interruption tend to the fracture rather than forcing closure, holding even the partial traces that insist on being heard. Bridging spiritual utterance, material truth, and fragmented histories, my art practice seeks a collective resonance where listening becomes a site of ethical attention and shared remembrance.
