Drawing For Sewing 6

Byun Kyung-Sup is a Korean artist born in 1957 who lives and works in Gwangju, Korea. She studied painting at the College of Fine Arts, Hongik University in Seoul where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1980. Shortly after she moved to Arlington, Texas with her husband where she dedicated her time rearing her children. Although from a wealthy family, she never considered their help a fallback and chose to build her life independently. During this period, she took up a job as a seamstress, which was one of many occupational identities she embodied to support her family. This is when she discovered the beauty and pain of an honest, albeit painstaking, labor. It wasn’t until 20 years later that she returned to Korea to study Fine Arts in the Graduate School of Chonnam University in Gwangju, Korea and held her paintbrush again. Ever since, her day-to-day work has been focused on painting infinite dots, which reflects her experience as a seamstress and her love of stiches. She now resides in Gwangju, Korea with her husband, a retired professor. She translates the concept of sewing into her work. Each tiny dot in her paintings resembles a stitch that requires a precise, purposeful brushstroke. Just like you can’t simply glue one garment to another, and each piece of clothing a result of a meaningful compilation of stitches, her work seeks to connect the seemingly insignificant dots to create a dimension for self-reflection and to remind myself that what may seem like a small dot can be part of a much larger, beautiful picture.

By exquisitely using a dot-painting technique, artist Byun Kyung-Sup expresses universal human experience based on her life in Korea and the U.S.

“As we look at Byun Kyung-Sup’s works which the artist creates with dots in diverse colors as if they are fine stitching, we can realize the weight contained in our thoughtless moments, and we can also read signs of hope within them.

Infinite dots in her work hope to resonate with anyone who has experienced hardship and frustration; they represent a pledge not to live a life of foregoing honest labor, a decision not to escape from the suffering that has come, and a belief that it will be meaningful even in this difficult time. 

Sewing for Byun is not merely the representation of life experience restricted to women in the traditional framework of gendered division of labor. Her art goes beyond feminism. It is an ode to those who sacrifice their own talents to support another, record the sadness for the talent wasted in the process, and pray earnestly for seeing the recovery. After all, like a phrase from Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), there is no “blameless soul (âme sans défauts),” whether man or woman, whether Korean or non-Korean. Whilst we are confused by the shades of Big Discourses, and losing the fundamentals to humanity in the tumultuous market, Byun’s works offer meanings to the little moment of everyday life and lay them before us as calmly and meticulously as if she is praying.”