SunHe is a Korean - American artist based in New York City. After moving to U.S. she earned her BFA in Fine Arts from Youngstown State University in Ohio. After graduation, she moved to New York City, worked as a fashion designer for five years and received an AAS degree in Fashion Design from Fashion Institute of Technology. She further studied art at the Art Student's League in New York City.
In her art, SunHe expresses the human spirit. It displays the raw and authentic relationships of this world, focusing on our more intimate emotional needs. Her works delve into our deeper soulful dilemmas that are born from our desire to love. They express our longings, our fantasies and dreams that allow us to escape our reality and join a poetic existence.
SunHe is hypersensitive of her surroundings and capture them with a feverish hand. Although she was traditionally trained as a watercolorist, she now abstracts her subjects, capturing their energy through line, shape, and color. She recreates the female body with a surreal edge, utilizing vivid colors and abstract markings to create a visceral, poetic experience. Each piece tells a story, and the emotions of each woman drawn envelopes her. Then, it is littered with symbols of life that confer to her audience a personal sense of lyricism with a perturbing sensuality. Butterflies inhabit her work, hinting at a deeper message of a woman’s sensuality and the growth, the metamorphosis, of her free spirited soul.
Self Portrait 2010
As of 2018, her work is moving towards an abstracted approach while continuing to express human emotions and energies that comes from life.
Note from the artist:
My art evokes a wide spectrum of feelings. It taps into your subconscious, bringing to life the hidden messages which lie within us, from our darkest pains to the most intimate forms of loving. If there is one thing I’d like people to learn from viewing my artwork, it is that life is always filled with endless beauty, even at its darkest time.
SunHe's studio in West Village
