Artist Bio
Anna Yuh Kyung (b. 1989, South Korea) is an Oakland-based ceramic artist whose sculptural work explores identity, memory, and belonging through vibrant forms, decorative surfaces, and floral motifs. Working in clay for over 15 years, her practice draws from material exploration and personal research surrounding cultural inheritance and selfhood.
As a Korean American transracial adoptee, Anna’s work is informed by an ongoing exploration of heritage, visual culture, and the ways identity can be assembled through aesthetics, memory, and personal experience.
Anna studied at Central Saint Martins in London, England. She lives and works in Oakland, California, where she maintains her studio practice and co-owns Merritt Ceramics, a community ceramics studio supporting a growing community of artists and makers.
Artist Statement
My new body of work is a culmination of my interests, material explorations, and personal research. My floral forms reference, among many things, Korean Hallyu culture, which became an early entry point in my reconnection with my heritage. I think of the early stages of this research as a kind of assemblage—collecting images, flavors, colors, and forms that resonated with me, perhaps existing as echoes of an ancestral timeline and serving as entry points into learning about a heritage that was not readily accessible to me during my childhood as an adoptee in an American family.
My flowers are at once an offering, a commemoration, and a promise—to my newborn daughter, to my younger self, and to our collective future together. My blooming forms are exuberant and joyful, unselfconscious beings that exist in bright colors and patterns regardless of whether anyone is looking.