GuNa (b. 1982) has explored ways of filling the gaps in understanding that are difficult to articulate within existing systems of language and perception, drawing on the material properties of painting and sculpture.
 
For her, these gaps in understanding are not simply states of absence, but spaces in which new differences are continually generated and where opposing meanings of affirmation and negation overlap.
 
In particular, GuNa abstractly renders the limitations of the body marked by absence and deficiency, drawing on her personal narratives, while seeking to capture the body’s potential in which desire and a sense of coldness intersect simultaneously.

GuNa’s practice unfolds through a slow process of unraveling and translating the moments when what she understands intellectually and emotionally cannot easily be communicated to others through language, leaving behind gaps where words fall silent.
 
For example, she transfers the melancholic and ambiguous objects she discovers within images onto the canvas, while using installations to hold in place what has been left behind, what has fallen, what cannot return, and what might disappear unless it is captured in the present. In this sense, her practice is less an attempt to represent a fixed form than an effort to grasp irregular, formless sensations.
 
Through this process, GuNa brings into her own world things that have been displaced from their original contexts and broken apart, revealing the existence of incomplete and deficient beings that resist definitive categorization.

At her 2017 solo exhibition 《askew bone and stuttering》, GuNa sought to reveal the fundamental nature of beings that remain unable to arrive at meaning.
 
Fragments of existence—bones, buttocks, hair, skin, stones, and insomnia—appear in her work without forming a complete whole or being sublimated into an idealized beauty. Instead, they remain in states of fracture, as seen in Detached Buttocks (2017), or of distortion and slackening, bearing witness to the illusion of wholeness.
 
The remnants of stone and bone in Nights that Cannot Sleep with Her Worries (2017) remain stripped of any definitive meaning, existing instead as irreducible fragments that resist representation.

The beings that inhabit GuNa’s work neither become incorporated into a definitive meaning of life nor disappear completely into a state of “nothingness”; instead, they remain at the threshold between the two, revealing a state of simply “being there.”
 
In the exhibition text, Professor Min Seung Ki describes “the ungraspable ‘simply being’ of meaning” and the gaps of “askewe­dness” and “slackening” as “holes and origins of meaning,” suggesting that GuNa’s work reveals these origins as gaps within meaning.

In the process of translating these gaps in meaning through sculpture and painting, GuNa blurs the boundary between subject and object, creating a sense of discontinuity in which things seem to connect only to fragment and disperse once again.
 
Her 2019 solo exhibition 《you And i And you And i》 exemplifies this approach, exploring through painting and spatial installation those moments in which things appear to form a whole, only to ultimately diverge and fall into disharmony.

GuNa draws on landscapes of fields and rivers as central motifs in these works, as well as figures found in her surroundings and in the works of other artists, including the figures depicted in the works of Kwon Jin Kyu.
 
Unlike her earlier works, in which the clarity of subjects and forms was more pronounced, these figures appear to merge seamlessly within the restrained tones and forms of the paintings, only to fragment and disperse once again like scattered pieces.
 
The spatial installations, which conceive of the exhibition space as a single body, are divided into White Bone (2019) and White Bone from Address (2019), both of which evoke a tilted spine.
 
Like the other works in the exhibition, these installations appear to connect as parts of a larger whole, yet ultimately diverge and fall apart, reinforcing the tension between connection and discontinuity.

The distinct individuality of each work is brought together into a single cohesive mass through the consistently restrained palette and wave-like treatment of the surfaces across the body of the work, creating a clear sense of direction.
 
Yet as one follows this direction, the work ultimately slips back into a realm of ambiguity. This is because the “clear indication” to which her work points is something that lies beyond the confines of language and reason.

Meanwhile, in her 2022 solo exhibition 《StillLife In DreamDreamDream》, GuNa created forms by pursuing the nature of “dreams,” which, despite having no tangible substance, can at times feel more vivid and real than reality itself.
 
Rather than reproducing forms with clearly defined contours, she works by grasping and tracing elusive afterimages that are constantly on the verge of disappearing, gradually shaping them into amorphous masses.
 
The scenes she takes as the subjects of her work are not things she has seen clearly: they exist within a monitor screen, behind a window, in the figure of a person seen from behind, in images someone painted in the distant past, or behind the veil of a dream. In other words, they are ghostlike traces of memories that she either saw or believes she saw.
 
Her practice of slowly revisiting and dwelling on fleeting experiences resonates with the attitude of still-life painting, in which one observes a subject for an extended period in an attempt to perceive what lies beyond its outward appearance.

The forms GuNa creates, like landscapes in dreams, have indistinct and distorted boundaries. In the exhibition text, curator Park Jihyung describes the surfaces and masses encountered by viewers as “the byproducts left behind after the fundamental values of the information she has absorbed have escaped the shell of the image, become invisible, and been embodied through the artist’s body.”
 
GuNa’s work, therefore, does not seek to reproduce the outward appearance of a subject, but rather to give form to the process of sensing and internally processing it. She continually separates and filters her own perception from the heterogeneous stimuli that enter from the outside, weaving together the pure images and sensations that remain through this process to create landscapes marked by folds.

Additionally, GuNa’s works that focus on parts of the body stem from her autobiographical experiences of illness since childhood. From the fourth grade of elementary school, she experienced problems with her bones and had to live wearing a large metal brace supporting her jaw and neck. The curvature of her spine eventually affected her neck and heart valve, leading her to undergo major surgery.
 
Works such as White Bone (2019–2023), which presents a form standing on its edge and lying sideways, and RidgeWaves Over IvoryHills (2019–2023), in which multiple horizontal surfaces are carefully supported by delicate legs, reflect the artist’s embodied experiences of a flattened body and misaligned bones.

Furthermore, these sculptures reveal countless traces across their surfaces, along with altered colors, bends, and cracks, embodying an attitude of physically confronting the passage of time. While their seemingly solid forms appear resistant to intervention, their ever-changing surfaces evoke the soft, vulnerable skin of the human body as it bears the marks of time.

Furthermore. IvoryBoneGrayProstheticsStill-life And Ivory BrownBlackPortrait, And BlueBluesWaterReal (2024), presented at the 《24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》, explores the collision of perspectives on deficiency and time, as experienced before and after illness.
 
She regards the pain that permeates the body as a kind of mystery, an internal “midnight,” through which she seeks to reveal the sensations and experiences latent within the body.

The work reflects on the universality of life and death as perceived by different entities in the wake of physical suffering. It oscillates between paradoxical states—speculation and action, disintegration and care, sorrow and detachment.
 
Through three sculptures combining materials with contrasting physical properties, GuNa highlights the body’s ambivalence, rendering visible hidden sensations such as the unfamiliar feel of skin during pain, dark internal pathways, and the flow of water through these channels.

In this way, GuNa draws on her experience of living with a fragile body and the two conflicting impulses of simultaneously accepting and resisting her own ailing body as material for her practice.
 
The two works presented in the 2025 MMCA exhibition 《Looking After Each Other》—IvoryBoneColdSkinGesture In RedBrownCabinet (2025) and IvoryBoneColdSkinGesture On RedBrownShelf (2025)—continue this exploration.

IvoryBoneColdSkinGesture In RedBrownCabinet and IvoryBoneColdSkinGesture On RedBrownShelf are not stand-alone sculptures. Fragmented pieces create the ensembles, resembling human figures or their gestures—leaning on or layered over one another.
 
In creating them, the artist was inspired by objects placed inside cabinets or on shelves. They are distinct yet harmoniously arranged into a shared landscape.

BluesInternalOrganDance In IvoryWagon consists of two paintings with bones and flesh. GuNa carved grooves into the canvas, filled them with another material, and then sanded the surface smooth.
 
This inserted matter forms the “bones” of the painting. Around these bones, a flurry of shapes evokes a body in perpetual motion—never still, always shifting.

In this way, drawing on her autobiographical experiences and embodied sensations of living with an ailing body, GuNa translates into painting and sculpture the emotions and moments that cannot be fully articulated through language or contained within established systems of perception. Her works possess incomplete and fragile surfaces, yet at the same time reveal forms that continue to exist by leaning against or overlapping with one another.
 
Through this exploration of bodily movement as both static and dynamic, GuNa sensitively captures the potential of the heterogeneous body.

“Even as the body grows thinner, drier, and weaker, an immortal moment bursts forth in the gesture of gently turning its head and waving its hand. Within that shattering light, there were yesterday and today, once again restored, rising to their feet.” (GuNa, Artist’s Note)

GuNa graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Suwon University and earned an MFA in Painting from Hongik University Graduate School. Her solo exhibitions include 《StillLife In DreamDreamDream》 (Artspace Boan 2, Seoul, 2022), 《Table of Contents from Twins》 (Park Soo Keun Museum Pavilion, Yanggu, 2020), and 《you And i And you And i》 (KICHE, Seoul, 2019).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Where Light Leans》 (ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul, 2026), 《Looking After Each Other》 (MMCA, Seoul, 2025), 《The 24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2024), 《I Want to Love Us》 (Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《The Sunken Eyes Were Dim》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2023), and 《Where All Places Are》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021).
 
GuNa has participated in residency programs at SeMA Nanji Residency (2026), White Block Residency (2023–2025), and Kumho Museum of Art Residency (2020). Her works are held in the collections of the Daejeon Museum of Art and Incheon Art Bank.

References

• 구나, GuNa (Artist Website)
• 구나, 인스타그램 (GuNa, Instagram)
• 인천아트플랫폼, 구나 (Incheon Art Platform, GuNa)
• 송은, [도록] 제24회 송은미술대상전 (SONGEUN, [Catalogue] The 24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition)
• 정현, [비평] 고양이 걸음: 구나가 세계를 만나는 방법
• 오뉴월 이주헌, [전시 개요 및 서문] 비스듬한 뼈와 늘어진 말 (O’NEWWALL E’JUHEON, [Exhibition Overview & Preface] Askew bone and stuttering)
• 기체, [서문] 너와나와너와나 (KICHE, [Preface] you And I And you And i)
• 하상현, [비평] 구나 작가론: 어떤 뼈를 상상하기
• 두산갤러리, [전시 개요] 눈은 멀고 (DOOSAN Gallery, [Exhibition Overview] The Sunken Eyes Were Dim)
• 아트스페이스 보안, [서문] 스틸라이프 인 드림드림드림 (Artspace Boan, [Preface] StillLife In DreamDreamDream)
• 국립현대미술관, [웹 도록] 기울어진 몸: 서로의 취약함이 만날 때 (MMCA, [Web Catalogue] Looking After Each Other)