Byun Chae Young KOREA, b. 2001

Byun Chae Young explores the relationship between memory and the body, focusing on how experience leaves traces on the body's surface. Her practice stems from a personal experience of witnessing the gradual loss of the ability to form new memories, as even recent experiences became difficult to retain. Attentive to the ways memory diverges from objective fact, she examines through painting how experience persists in altered and fragmentary forms, suspended between recollection and erasure.

Her work takes shape through unconscious drawing, repetitive brushwork, and the successive application and removal of paint. Thick layers of crimson, reddish-brown, and amber pigments evoke the skin and the body's interior, while rough textures reminiscent of scabs and scars suggest a surface marked by the accumulation of time. For Byun, drawing is less an act of consciously recalling the past than a process of attending to bodily sensation. Through repeated gestures, paint accumulates in layers, bearing traces of experiences that elude conscious recollection. The resulting surfaces evoke both the formation of scars and the gradual process of healing, holding together the persistence of memory and its continual transformation. In this practice, the body emerges not as a fixed repository of memory but as a site where time accumulates, wears away, and continually transforms. Through the build-up of material and the evolving texture of the surface, Byun explores the relationship between memory and forgetting, experience and sensation, giving material form to traces of time that resist complete articulation.

She is expected to graduate from the Department of Fine Arts at the Korea National University of Arts in 2027. She lives and works in Seoul, where she is an artist-in-residence at Chapter II.