Taeyi Kang

Taeyi was born and raised in South Korea, where she started her Ceramics and Glass career. She undertakook a BFA at Hongik University in 2016 focussing mostly on ceramics, but also working with glass. To broaden her expertise she embarked on the MA Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2018. During this time she focussed her interest on glass making. She expresses and tells her stories through visually poetic work, by relating the properties of the materials of ceramics and glass to human nature.

In particular, Taeyi explores the quality of fragility in glass; it is an ideal material to represent sensitive topics that are metaphors for existence, relating to human conditions such as fragility-grief, trauma, loss, and remembrance. Taeyi values that glass can be repaired or healed through heat, and works to give a hopeful message about human existence and life, to convey empathy, comfort, and love.

Taeyi welcomes conversation about residencies, commissions, exhibiting, social engagement, and any other opportunities locally and internationally to connect.

My work is similar to writing poetry. I like to express the numerous sentences I wish to write with poetic connotations through metaphors. Just like carefully selecting words to create beautifully refined sentences, I use glass as a language of metaphor and convey themes by stimulating the emotions or imagination of the observer through the harmonious integration of seemingly unrelated mediums, based on pictorial elements.

While it is difficult to appreciate written poetry due to the limitation of language, craftworks made by my own hands and can be understood and appreciated through their pictorial, visual, and material elements.

Most of my works are in the form of love poems, but there are also epic poems that desperately build up the values, direction and outlook of life, and poems of earnest last wishes.