Buttons, pins, and beads on panel
43,3 x 82,7 in (110 x 210 cm)

Ran Hwang was born in 1960 in South Korea, and currently lives and works in New York City. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and her MFA from the Chung-Ang University Graduate School of Arts in Seoul. Hwang is known for using thousands of buttons, beads and pins to create large-scale, intricate installations. Her practice draws from Buddhist philosophy, and often depicts motifs from traditional Buddhist or Korean art: Buddha figures, cherry blossoms and birds in flight, temples and mandalas. Like the existence of human beings, the materials from the fashion industry that the artist uses are ordinary and mundane; each button is free to move along the length of the pin, suggesting the human desire to be free from restrictions. Hwang describes her time-consuming, repetitive and labour intensive process of hammering buttons into panels as a form of meditation that helps her find inner peace, like a monk practicing Zen Buddhism. That sense of peace is conveyed in her artwork, which in turn invites meditation from the viewer, in order to reach the state of fulfilment as promoted by Buddhist philosophy.