Yuni Kim Lang is a Michigan-based visual artist who creates sculptures, photographs and wearable art that explores themes of weight, mass, accumulation, hair and cultural identity. She makes sculptures out of rope and synthetic materials where it transcends its materiality and become bodily. She is fascinated by what people give power and meaning to, along with our obsession with adornment. 

A recent MFA graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art, she has had solo exhibitions at Sienna Patti in Lenox, Massachusetts and Museum of New Art in Detroit, Michigan. Her most recent work can be seen in Material Fix at the Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. 

‘Yuni Kim Lang’s works are about today: deeply concerned with materiality and process, Lang addresses the most contemporary issues in jewelry and in art generally. The strongly autobiographical works also reflect the artist’s multicultural background. Born in Korea, brought up in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing, educated as a child at international schools, and then studying and working in New York from 2004 until 2011, Lang routinely thinks in three languages: Korean, Chinese, and English. In her work—particularly in the objects featured in this exhibition that developed out of her graduate studies in the Metalsmithing Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, she strives to find one voice that acknowledges her Asian roots and reflects the globalization of art today. Lang maps her approach by associating appreciation of the end product with Eastern thought while viewing the creative process or ‘journey’ as a Western ideal. – excerpted from catalogue essay by Davira S. Taragin