NEW YORK, NY.- Bortolami announced the representation of Seung Ah Paik (b. 1979 in Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA). Paik’s current exhibition Suspended Landscapes is on view at Bortolami through 30 May, and a suite of new paintings by the artist is on view at the Rubell Museum in Miami through Fall 2026. Bortolami will represent Paik’s work globally in collaboration with Gratin, New York.

Paik is best known for her paintings that explore the physical and emotional geographies of the human form. Drawing upon traditional techniques of portrait painting from the late Joseon Dynasty in Korea, she creates contemporary compositions that subvert one’s own sense of embodiment through an uncanny, first-person perspective that mirrors how each of us perceives our corporeal selves. Through the meticulous and unflinching reproduction of the specificities of her own skin, Paik depicts body parts – intertwined hands, feet, limbs, breasts, and torsos – connected at unexpected and contorted angles. The resulting portraits exist as an antithesis to the highly filtered and manipulated concepts of physical beauty ubiquitous in everyday life, foregrounding the body as a living, cartographic archive.

About her work, Paik has said: “As I kept painting myself from my own point of view, I realized that the ‘self I see’ is never a single, fixed image. What I see of myself – my hands while working, my legs when I look down, my body in fleeting everyday moments – changes constantly, shifting with time, movement, and emotion. I began to understand that my perception of myself is layered and always in flux. Fragmentation became the most honest way to capture that experience. It was not a calculated decision, but a natural evolution of how I have come to see and translate myself on canvas.”*

Paik studied Oriental painting at Seoul National University and Fashion Design at Central Saint Martin’s before earning her MFA in Painting from Goldsmiths in London.


*Paik, Seung Ah. Interview with Olivia Sand. Asian Art Newspaper, September, 2025, pp. 2-4.