Samantha Yun Wall

Samantha Yun Wall (born 1977 in Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean-American visual artist based in Portland, Oregon. Wall immigrated to the United States as a child, and her drawings and mixed-media works explore the psychological and emotional dimensions of transcultural identity. Centering feminine perspectives within diasporic experience, she examines what it means to navigate Black Korean, multiracial, immigrant, and American identities across different cultural and social contexts.  Wall is best known for highly detailed figurative drawings created with delicately layered ink, Conté crayon, graphite, charcoal, and related materials. Often working in monochrome on Dura-Lar, paper, or Claybord, she constructs bodies that appear suspended, doubled, fragmented, entangled, or transformed. Her figures communicate interior psychological states while addressing the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility frequently imposed upon women of color and other people positioned as social outsiders.  Her imagery draws from Korean folklore, global mythology, science fiction, creation narratives, and female archetypes including ghosts, monsters, healers, grandmothers, and storytellers. Recent work has considered Black Amerasian histories, the children born to Asian women and United States service members during periods of military occupation, and the stigma, secrecy, displacement, and inherited trauma surrounding these histories. In What We Leave Behind, Wall uses overlapping female silhouettes and the Korean Pasque flower to explore mourning, family memory, loss, care, and what remains unspoken across generations.  Wall received a BFA in Studio Art and Drawing from the University of South Carolina in 2001 and an MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2011. Her work has been exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Whatcom Museum, and Hangaram Art Museum at the Seoul Arts Center. Her honors include the 2024 Betty Bowen Award, the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship, the Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts, the Arlene Schnitzer Prize, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant.