Soyo Paek

5 - 27 February 2026
Opening celebration: Thursday 5 February, 5-7pm

The exhibition "Translucences" expands from asemic writing - a form of mark-making without literal language - into large-scale canvases that integrate drawing and painting. The works explore relationships between language, translation, and perception, using charcoal, pencil, and gestural marks to reveal traces, absences, and the provisional nature of meaning, while water and pigments add fluidity and subtle layering.

Materials, including pigments and rabbit-skin glue, interact with drawing media to produce translucent, hybrid forms that appear both present and fading. These processes are informed by Taoist principles, emphasising impermanence, flow, and relationality, allowing the works to operate as both physical and conceptual experiences.

Canvases are partially pinned, obscuring and revealing space, while some areas remain exposed, letting water’s transparency reveal the fabric beneath. Layered marks, washes, and overlapping gestures form multidimensional, shifting spaces where identity, memory, and perception converge, inviting viewers to engage sensorially and reflectively with the materials’ ephemeral qualities.

Soyo Paek is a Naarm (Melbourne)-based artist, born in South Korea. They completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2025. Working across painting, drawing, and moving image, Paek explores how textures, surfaces, and material traces shape perception and gesture, attending to subtle interactions between human and non-human entities. Their diasporic experience informs an ongoing inquiry into translation, displacement, and cultural crossings, with painting and material practices as provisional sites where traces resonate, suggest connections, and invite sensory engagement with unstable, in-between spaces. Paek received the 2025 NGV Women’s Association Award.