A series of paintings exploring identity and belonging by artist Su A Chae. Chae holds a BA and MA in Business from Ewha Womans University in South Korea. After relocating to the United States, Chae transitioned to the arts, earning her MFA in Painting from Indiana University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Arkansas. One of the ideas Chae encountered in accounting academia related to information asymmetry and moral hazards. Her interest in how systems manage asymmetry and visibility has carried over into her painting. For Chae, balance is a site of resistance rather than neutrality. Creating paradoxical spatial propositions and working with contextual ambiguity, Chae creates a visual field that is simultaneously familiar and unsettled.
“The work emerges from lived experience shaped by movement across cultural contexts, where belonging is continually recalibrated rather than assumed. Balance, in this sense, is not a static condition but an active process—maintained through adjustment, negotiation, and care. Drawing from subtle references to Korean cultural memory—including tiger patterns derived from minhwa, traditional Korean folk painting—I layer figural elements, patterns, and fragmented forms into dense visual compositions.”