Suki Seokyeong Kang, who transmuted the natural world and centuries-old elements of Korean heritage into elegant abstract paintings, textiles, sculptures, and installations that are quietly affecting and slyly humorous, died on Sunday. She was 47. (In the Korean method of determining age, she was 48.)

The cause was cancer, which Kang had been battling for several years, according to the Tina Kim Gallery, her representative in New York.

Kang’s early studies were in traditional East Asian ink painting, but she made her name with bracingly contemporary objects, interweaving postminimal forms, traditional craft techniques, and industrial production. Whether hung on the wall, perched on a pedestal, or placed on the floor, they have a charismatic tactility, and some can be wielded, or used as a stage, by performers.

For a series of “Grandmother Tower” sculptures that she began in 2011, Kang wrapped colored thread around spare dish racks, which she then perched one atop another, the friction of the string keeping them just barely upright. These precarious towers are slumped over slightly, recalling the artist’s grandmother late in life.

Installation view of “Suki Seokyeong Kang: Willow Drum Oriole” (2023) at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. Photo: Cheolki Hong. Courtesy the Leeum Museum of Art

Kang’s “Mountain” pieces evoke summits with curving steel planes, sometimes adorned with thread. Displayed together, they coalesce into bewitching landscapes that can recall traditional ink painting. Again and again in her work, modest elements (in material and size) become greater than the sum of their parts as they are moved and combined. (Some even sit atop wheels—part robot, part mischievous forest creature.)

“The size and weight of each unit is developed so as not to exceed the dimensions of a standardized human body,” Kang told Pin-Up magazine in 2018. “Each object has its own name, such as Heavy Round, and Warm Round—and when the units are combined, the works can be renewed with titles such as Round Cliff and Poking Square.”

Suki Seokyeong Kang was born on May 19, 1977, in Seoul to Taklim Kang and Jeongsook Choi. She did her undergraduate and M.F.A. work at Ewha Womans University in the South Korean capital, where she later became a professor of painting, and received a master’s in painting from the Royal College of Art in London.

Kang recalled a pivotal moment in her development while speaking with Art Basel’s website earlier this year. As a student, “most of my friends were making really beautiful landscape paintings,” she said. “I always thought, ‘Why do I have to draw the mountain?’ Can I draw that kind of form using paper rather than depicting a mountain?” Finally she realized, “This paper itself is a mountain.”

The “space allotted for each individual serves as the primary grammar of my art,” Kang told Ocula in 2018. She bracketed and defined space in sculptures built from empty rectangles, and worked with artisans to make hwamunseok, traditional sedge mats on which dancers performed chunaengmu, a traditional court dance during the later years of the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910), Korea’s final dynastic kingdom.

Installation view of “Suki Seokyeong Kang: Mountain—Hour—Face” at the MCA Denver. Photo courtesy Wes Magyar

Kang’s hwamunseok are rigorously gridded, drawing on the structure of jeongganbo, a system of music notation developed in 15th-century Joseon, and they radiate patterns of color that suggest natural forces or furtive symbolic meanings. They lure you in.

Over the past decade, Kang became one of the leading artists of her generation. She appeared in the 2016 and 2018 Gwangju Biennales in South Korea, the 2018 Shanghai Biennale, and the 2019 Venice Biennale. In 2022, she installed her first major outdoor sculpture commission in Qatar, an array of mountainous shapes that she termed “a form of shelter—more like a house or other architecture—that can invisibly protect and allow for greater individuality.”

The next year, a thrilling survey of Kang’s work, “Willow Drum Oriole,” ran at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul in 2023. It was a kind of gesamtkunstwerk, incorporating her sculptures and wall pieces, as well as video, audio recordings of poetry, and live performers. A solo show titled “Mountain—Hour—Face” is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver through May 4.

Kang’s survivors include her husband, Doil Gong; her daughter, Hyun Gong; and her brother, Yohan Kang.

“I am not the type of artist who suggests grand visions for the future, but more of an artist who tries to talk about things that happen in close proximity in the present,” Kang told the Korean Herald in 2019, while discussing her Venice Biennale works.

Her aim, she told the curator Connie Butler in 2023, was to create a space where “we can constantly reconcile imbalances and conflicts and achieve complete harmony with each other.”