Brooklyn artist Sumin Hwang pulls theory off the page and onto the body

I'm so full of desire; I want to eat salmon and drink coffee and eat cake, 2024. Featured in Gallery 7 of the Brooklyn Museum's Brooklyn Artists Exhibition, October 4, 2024 - January 26, 2025. Photo by Emma Oshiro, courtesy of artist.

By JELINDA MONTES February 19, 2025

“I’m so full of desire; I want to eat salmon and drink coffee and eat cake” is the title of a sculpture and costume by Sumin Hwang that was installed in the Brooklyn Museum’s Brooklyn Artist’s Exhibition from October 4 to January 26. It’s also a line from 20th century Brazilian-Ukrainian writer Clarice Lispector’s posthumous novel, A Breath of Life. The book is a dialogue between a god-like author and a character he brought to life desiring to be free.

After reading the novel in late 2023, the 24 year old artist was consumed in a line of inquiry on desire and its cultural demonization. Hwang often explores amorphous concepts taking inspiration from history, literature and contemporary philosophy, which are then expressed as what she calls avatars that embody those ideas. Sitting in Chinatown Soup, an art collective in Manhattan’s lower east side where Hwang holds a studio residency, she further explained her process.

“I think that they're like avatars that are representative of very specific things or certain concepts that I want to think about really deeply,” Hwang said. “I think that in the construction of them, they teach me a lot about that idea and then when I wear them, or when I activate them, it's like we're becoming one.” Hwang works across mediums and forms, bringing many of her works to life as filmed performance art. 

The sculpture flips the narrative that desire is frivolous and invaluable. “The erotic and desire is actually the most powerful force in the whole world — It's the most intuitive force within oneself that points to the infinite capacity of joy,” Hwang said.

A wearable costume, the sculpture is crafted primarily with painted muslin fabric that is stuffed, sewed and adorned with hair, nails, embroidered beading and wire. Hot pink satin is filled with stuffing and formed into several hands branching out from the organic rounded bodice of green muslin. The pink arms hold braided pigtails, behind the braids are sleeves for real arms and two small holes for seeing and breathing are framed by bangs and topped with a sort of tufted tiara. The back of the piece has a train of extended gloves and more braided tresses that are ornately organized together into a bow-like shape. The whole sculpture can be placed over the torso, or sit free standing without a wearer as it is displayed in the museum.

Hwang is one of just over 200 artists featured in the Brooklyn Museum’s Artist Exhibition celebrating the museum's 200th anniversary. While some artists featured were invited to be a part of the exhibition, a significant portion of the work featured came from an open call. The call’s general criteria was the artist must have their primary residence or studio in Brooklyn and the work itself be created between 2019 and 2024.

“The Brooklyn artist exhibition that's up right now is the largest group of artists that the Brooklyn Museum has ever had on view at the same time,” Jennie Tang, the special exhibitions administrator, said.

The exhibition is the museum’s most ambitious showing of local artists with two entrances, seven gallery halls and a video room. In the past, the Brooklyn Museum held similar exhibitions with up to 400 local artists featured, but it had multiple cycles of pieces on display and a large amount of the art was in flat files instead of on the walls, Tang said.

One of only five artists born in the 21st century, Hwang is part of the youngest in the cohort. However, the museum’s selection process was anonymous, not including demographic information like age in consideration of the pieces, Tang explained. So her art stands for itself even among those established for decades in the field.

Her youth further stands out considering she didn’t begin working as an artist until her junior year of college. A graduate of Rice University, Hwang began her studies in art history. She reached the pinnacle of success in her department with prestigious internships at places like the Museum of Fine Art Houston — yet she was bored.

Then Hwang declared a second major in studio art. “I came into it very late and generally kind of underprepared honestly from a craft perspective,” she said.

What Hwang may have lacked initially in technical skill was made up by sheer enthusiasm. Rice’s Department of Art undergraduate director, Josh Bernstein, said “she did a thing that I didn't do in undergrad, which was recognize the things that were being offered as opportunities as opposed to responsibilities.”

Hwang always sensed that working as an artist would suit her. Nevertheless, taking the leap was not as easy as she made it look to her professors and peers. “Am I gonna do this?” she asked. “Do I want to lean into this thing that I wanted to do for a long time but haven’t for some reason?”

I'm so full of desire; I want to eat salmon and drink coffee and eat cake, 2024 view from back. Photo by Emma Oshiro, courtesy of artist.

“I think me and many people are afraid of joy — like feeling joy can be a scary thing because what if you start and then you lose it,” Hwang said. “It was a very complicated emotion and like I guess it still is, but it changed my life literally forever.”

Hwang describes all her works as a primitive hypertext, a term coined by writer Octavia Butler. While, hypertext itself is mainly known as the first letter of digital markup language, HTML, primitive hypertext is the process of drawing connections and meaning from a variety of otherwise unconnected forms of media. Just as the digital hypertext connects topics on screen to related topics through links, primitive hypertext links ideas across a variety of mediums into a unique amalgamation.

“I think that it's like when I'm generating ideas, a lot of the source material comes from the sort of Korean history point, but it just bounds in so many different directions,” she said. “All of that history together and reading those things all at the same time — it's the primitive hypertext — sparked my interest in mask culture and then also avatar culture and performance culture.”

Most of Hwang’s art inspiration originates from the culture and history of the Korean Peninsula in the 20th century. Both of her parents immigrated from and currently reside in South Korea. Growing up in San Diego, Hwang relished the large Korean community in her neighborhood, always feeling close to her roots.

Long before working as an artist, Hwang spent a lot of her time in high school working on the newspaper at San Diego’s Torrey Pines High School. It was perhaps the first instance of Hwang creating for the sake of creation. 

“The newspaper program at our school was so unnecessarily self-serious, like we would stay until 3 am once a month finishing the paper and pouring over it and literally no one read it,” Hwang said. “It was a running joke, we would spend so much time and people would throw stacks of them in the trash.”

Such a spirit of creating something for its own sake, is something Hwang needed to embrace when deciding to pursue art as a career. “I feel like a really liberating thing is that, frankly, very few people care about what I'm doing,” she said. “I don't mean that in a self-deprecating way, I think it’s just kind of true.”

At times that lack of outside interest or pressure can feel suffocating or sad, Hwang said, but it allows her to explore ideas out of pure curiosity. If people connect and respond to it, that’s great — but it’s not the end all be all of her art.

When reflecting on her childhood, family and friendships the word beautiful came up a lot. The landscape where she grew up was beautiful, but more so the people that raised her. Conversing  through affectionate tears, it’s clear that Hwang isn’t afraid of sentimentality, in fact it's something she explored in her Brooklyn Museum piece. While descriptors like intellectual, well-read or highbrow could be accurate descriptors of Hwang — her sentimentality and care shape those stiffer qualities into a person that people like to be around and appreciate genuinely. It comes across in her art as well, with the various literary and theoretical influences being formed into something beautifully intelligent. 

Hwang’s newest completed piece, “Fate Work (1),” leaned against the curtained partition of her section in the basement studio at Chinatown Soup. Hwang is one of the newest residents of the program, joining in September 2024, with plans to have a solo show at the gallery this February.

The work is a large tapestry of interwoven prints featuring airbrushed patterns, photographs and texts that’s set in a wooden frame and hung with thick metal chains. Just as her piece in the Brooklyn Museum’s title borrows from one of her literary influences, “Fate Work (1)” references a philosophical concept discussed by performance artist Valentina Desideri and critical theorist Stefano Harney.

Fate work is the denouncement of capitalistic futures-oriented goal setting around work and life, which Desideri and Harney called work fate. Instead it places the value on the present and devalues typical ideas of success. While working on this piece, Hwang wrestled with the idea of fate work as particular visions of her final product “flopped.”

“What I referred to as flops is when I have a very specific idea and then I'm like, ‘I have to make this,’ and a lot of the time it just doesn't work on a structural standpoint or ultimately looks bad and then I'm devastated,” Hwang said.

“There were multiple points in the project where I was getting so frustrated that I had to take a step back because I wasn't embodying fate work,” she said. Just as her wearable sculptures help activate the ideas she works with, working through the flop stages of “Fate Work” helped Hwang come to terms with ideas of prescriptive success. 

Less than five years in the art space, Hwang has been featured in the second largest museum in the most populous city in the country. Perhaps her lack of pressure toward a particular future or goal is allowing the freedom to create art that interacts with big ideas without fear or pause.

“I just want to make work that I feel aligns with how I think and work that makes me happy,” she said. “At the end of the day, that's kind of the only thing that I can guarantee in my life, anything else is just like whatever happens, happens.” WM