EmBer Eunwoo Byun
Ember Eunwoo Byun is a Korean visual artist and arts professional based in New York. She earned her BFA in Korean Painting from Kyung Hee University in South Korea and her BA in Studio Art from Hunter College, CUNY, where she also completed coursework in Arts Management and Leadership.
Her professional experience spans gallery and exhibition operations, arts education, artist relations, and cultural programming. In New York, she has worked with Elizabeth Sutton Collection as a Fine Arts Intern and BRIC Arts Media as an Education Intern, gaining experience in art production, program administration, and public-facing arts programming. In South Korea, she worked as an Assistant Art Instructor at Dali Art Academy and served as Director of Culture Planning for the Kyung Hee University Student Council, where she organized artist lecture programs, conducted artist research and outreach, coordinated venues, created promotional materials, and managed cultural events and field trips.
Her curatorial experience includes co-directing HERE WE ARE, a two-week community art project that transformed a private studio into an exhibition and gathering space, and independently organizing Translation: Interpret the Moment, a group exhibition featuring ten artists during the COVID-19 period. Across these projects, she has worked on artist coordination, exhibition planning, venue logistics, promotional design, digital communications, and gallery presentation.
Alongside this work, Byun maintains a studio practice rooted in painting. Her work explores memory, labor, the body, and the traces of human presence, drawing connections between intimate personal experience and broader questions of belonging and everyday life.
Artist Statement
The world cannot be perceived all at once. Within endlessly expanding time and space, in conversations with unfamiliar people, and in the words I encounter for the first time, there is always a sense of distance. As an outsider in reality, even the most ordinary moments must pass through sound, tone, and surface before I can begin to understand them. I think of this delayed perception between the world and myself as a “buffer.”
This buffer exists between reality and the virtual, between direct experience and mediated experience; it is both something that envelops me and a kind of cushion. My work explores the scenes glimpsed through this gap, along with the sensation of never fully reaching them. In this process, the world oscillates between understanding and misunderstanding, ultimately remaining in a state of incomplete perception.
