Erin Hyunhee Kang is an artist based in Boulder, Colorado. Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Erin moved to the states at age of sixteen. She received BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and MFA in Drawing & Painting concentrated area from University of Colorado Boulder.
Erin began her career as a photography assistant at The New Yorker magazine at Condé Nast before joining Tapehouse Toons as part of the visual effects team for The X-Presidents series on Saturday Night Live’s TV Funhouse and Disney’s Lizzie McGuire. She then worked as an in-house book jacket designer at Penguin Group USA, creating covers for award-winning authors across prestigious imprints such as G.P. Putnam’s Sons and Riverhead. After relocating to Boulder, Erin taught visual arts at high school in Boulder Valley School District and currently teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Erin’s work reflects her personal experiences, engaging with the liminal dimensions of life events and translating them into visual forms shaped by an interplay of traditions, folklore, metaphors, mythologies, and allegories.
Erin’s freelance clients include Penguin Random House, Boulder Valley School District, Denver Art Museum, and Denver Theatre District & Public Arts. Erin has recently exhibited her work at Artwork Loveland, AKAGallery, Dairy Arts Center, RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CU Art Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.
Artist Statement:
My current artistic practice focuses on graphite drawings that explore what it means to encounter the past. As an artist living between cultures, I am drawn to the spaces where memory, loss, identity, and belonging become uncertain. My work begins with personal experiences of diaspora and the moments in life when the past unexpectedly enters the present.
This in-between place is not simply a physical place, but a state of being. A space between the past and the future, life and death, memory and forgetting, the familiar and the unknown. I am interested in what happens in these uncertain spaces, where things are no longer what they were but have not yet become something new. These spaces remind me of ruins, not simply remnants of the past, but as places suspended between what has been and what is still becoming. A ruin carries evidence of what once existed while also becoming something new. It holds absence and presence at the same time. In a similar way, my drawings consider how we carry the remains of our experiences and how those remnants continue to shape who we are.
Through graphite drawing, I build fragmented and layered images from personal memories, photographs, traditions, folklore, mythology, metaphors, and allegories. The slow and repetitive process of drawing allows me to examine experiences of loss, regret, desire, tragedy, and mortality. Rather than offering clear answers, the work stays with these unresolved emotions and allows ambiguity to become part of the image.