Kayoon Anderson

Kayoon Anderson’s paintings explore memory, identity, and belonging through imagined domestic interiors informed by her background in architecture and her mixed Korean and British heritage. She draws on photographs and memories from her time across the United Kingdom, Europe, and Korea, constructing dreamlike scenes that merge multiple geographies and moments, assembling figures, objects, patterns, colours, and architectural forms into layered compositions. Although figures appear throughout her work, they are not presented as the central subject, instead existing as part of the architectural fabric of each composition, blurring the boundary between body and environment. Anderson takes further influence from the multi-perspective compositions of European medieval painting and traditional Korean munbangdo still lifes, creating carefully balanced works in which memory, architecture, and identity coexist in delicate equilibrium.

Kayoon Anderson was born in Seoul in 1997. She studied Architecture at the University of Cambridge (2015-2018), before completing a Diploma in Portrait Painting at the Heatherleys School of Fine Art, London (2022), and an MA in Fine Art at the City & Guilds of London Art School, London (2024). She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Royal Institute of Oil Painters Emerging Artist Prize (2023), the Art Academy London Award (2023), and the Windsor & Newton Young Artist Award, Third Prize (2024). In 2024, she was Artist in Residence at Queen’s College, Oxford. Recent solo exhibitions include Echoes of Home at EDJI Gallery, Brussels (2024); Entangled Roots, a two-person exhibition at Scroll NYC, New York (2025); and First Days at Rhodes Contemporary Art Gallery, London (2026). Selected group exhibitions include the Florence Biennale, Florence (2021); the New English Art Club Annual Exhibition at Mall Galleries, London (2021, 2024); Portrait Artist of the Year: The Exhibition at Compton Verney, Warwickshire (2022); the Royal Institute of Oil Painters Annual Exhibition at Mall Galleries, London (2022-2025); and Les Choses de la Vie at Millenn’Art, Paris (2023). Anderson currently lives and works in London.