Gunyoung Kim was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. She received her Bachelors of Fine Art in Ceramics from Kook-Min University in Korea in 2010 and her MFA from The Ohio State University in 2014 where she developed her studio practice and gained teaching experience. After graduate school, Gunyoung was the long-term ceramic artist-in-residence at Lawrence Art Center in Lawrence, Kansas. She also completed short-term residencies at different places including  Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT and Red lodge clay center in Red lodge MT. Gunyoung was selected as one of the 2016 Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artists and she received the Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council in 2017. She is currently a full-time studio artist in Ohio. 

Over the last several years I’ve been developing figurative work that explores human emotions that are subtle and ambiguous. I find inspirations from my daily life and I strongly feel my emotions come from connections that exist between humans, objects, and environments. I focus on inner aspects of human beings through facial expressions, gestures, staging, and disfigurement. 

Human emotions are so complicated. Our reactions to the world we find ourselves in are so multi-layered that we sometimes don't even understand our own emotional states and feelings. This complexity and ambiguity comes from vulnerability of the human psyche with all its imperfections has been main idea of my sculpture and I'm interested in putting these ideas into physical forms emphasizing them through placement and tactile manipulation. In my newest project “ My burden”, I’ve expanded my work to include animals and flowers and address issues of gender, politics and religion. I was inspired by Christianity which emphasizes beauty in pain. This duality is part of a more universal human experience. “Hardship and pain never go away, but remain a part of us—they somehow harden and become beautiful.” I use flowers as a metaphor of this relationship, pain and beauty.