About

Hyunah Koh (b. Korea) is a London-based artist whose work explores painting as an evolving, immersive environment rooted in the concepts of ecology and sensorial transformation. She combines tactile materials on the surface of her paintings, which shift from flatness into form. Through folding and elevation, the surfaces begin to resemble living structures.

Koh’s practice engages viewers through bodily memory, spatial transformation, and XR (extended reality) interaction. In her ongoing series Bengal Rose and Tadpoles into the Abyss, paintings emerge as layered ecosystems where cicadas, frogs, tadpoles, seasonal signals, and melting textures create terrains in which memory and matter interact.

With this project, Koh explores how her painterly sensibility can directly permeate the viewer- transforming not just the surface, but space itself into a living painting.Her work is currently supported by Colart UK (Winsor & Newton Scholarship), and she is completing her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2025).

Artist Statement

Painting is not something to observe from a distance. It is something to enter, to touch, and to live with. For me, painting becomes a way of living through sensation, transformation, and embodied time.

I call this process sensorial evolution. It is a way of thinking and making where memory, body, material, and environment continuously reshape one another. Painting is not a static object but a dynamic site of change, where time, texture, and presence accumulate and shift.

This evolution is both physical and regenerative. Sensations return from memory, reactivated through touch, spatial immersion, or the simple act of being present. In this way, painting becomes a space where the past and present intertwine, where transformation happens through the continuity of touch and time.

My work is grounded in an ecological way of thinking, where matter, memory, and perception circulate together. I use materials that hold weight and history: red earth, modeling clay, acrylic color, dustsheet, wall paint, canvas, wood panel, and paper. Through folding, layering, and overlapping gestures, I build surfaces that feel physical and alive, shifting slowly from flatness into structures that rise into space.

In my largest works, folding becomes central. These pieces do not sit quietly against the wall. They enter the room, becoming painterly structures shaped by gravity, movement, and time. They hold not stasis, but a state of ongoing transition.

Alongside these, I create interactive works that invite touch. I want viewers to engage with the surfaces, reawakening dormant senses and bringing stored memories into the present.

My practice begins from the belief that painting is an evolving organism, a living terrain where boundaries dissolve and new connections become possible.

Like morning glories blooming each day, I want my work to offer moments of quiet awakening, small openings into the world, and spaces where something new can begin to take root.

Education