SoVA Anderson Lecturer
Sunkoo Yuh
Anderson Lecture – October 28, 2025
Yuh was born in 1960 in South Korea, immigrated to the U.S. in 1988 and now resides in Athens, GA, where he is a professor of art at the University of Georgia. He received his BFA degree from Hong Ik University, Seoul, Korea and his MFA degree from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred, NY.
His work is informed by his personal and intimate experiences in everyday life. His ceramic sculptures are composed of tight groupings of various forms including plants, animals, fish, and human figures. While Korean art and Buddhist, Christian and Confucian beliefs inform some aspects of his imagery, his work is largely driven by implied narratives that often suggest socio-political critiques. Yuh’s current focus on type of architectural-scale sculpture and on pushing his medium to its limits of size.
He has exhibited widely and has received many awards and honors. He was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, the Grand Prize at the 2nd World Ceramic Biennale International Competition, Icheon, Korea, The Elizabeth R. Raphael Founder’s Prize and the Virginia A. Groot Foundation. His work is in the collections of The Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., The Museum of Fine Arts, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, Houston, Houston, TX, Icheon World Ceramic Center, Icheon, Korea, the International Museum of Ceramic Art, Alfred, NY, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, the Oakland Museum of Art, California and more.
Artist's Statement
"I wanted to showcase the shift from representational to abstract by avoiding the figurative and narrative aspects of my work and creating more abstract forms."
As an artist, my aspiration has always been for my work to evolve naturally, free from forced intentions. However, when opportunities for exploration and change would arise, this desire would linger in the back of my mind and turn into fear, hindering my courage to delve into new possibilities.
The core scope of my work often revolves around transforming the images from my mind into tangible sculptures. My sculptures, ranging from monumental to small, serve simultaneously as expressions of physical and psychological realities. Through my work, I aim to convey my life experiences and relationships with the people around me, encompassing the interplay of front and back, inside and outside, and present and past memories.
In the past, my artistic process began with intuitively and spontaneously drawing images with ink and brush. From these drawings, I’d select a few to hand build into three-dimensional clay sculptures. My works are built from different clay bodies such as porcelain, stoneware, and porcelain casting slip. I glaze my sculptures using fifty different color glazes, layering them upon each other. The firing process, which reaches around 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, allows the glazes to run freely. Rather than adhering to controlled outcomes, I allow the glazes to evolve liberally and embrace the results of unexpected serendipities.
My recent work represents a transitional phase of my artistic journey, a bridge between my past and present creations. I aimed to demonstrate this evolution by creating new pieces from existing ones. I wanted to showcase the shift from representational to abstract by avoiding the figurative and narrative aspects of my work and creating more abstract forms. By making a hundred hollow forms and decorating them intuitively in a routine manner, my work went from meaningful to meaningless. I let go of my polychromatic glazes and shifted to monochrome, using the clay’s original colors as black and white. These changes allowed me to compose a transitional body of work.
While the reception of these new pieces is uncertain, I find excitement in the transformative changes they embody. With these ideas, this is a significant step toward breaking free from my old work and self to understanding my new creations and evolved self.