Kayoon Anderson:The Rooms We Grow

The exhibition’s title refers to Anderson’s decentralised, holistic approach to depicting her subjects, who both sink into and grow out of the objects and contexts surrounding them. Figures are not set against a backdrop or posed – instead they are interwoven within the architectural fabric of her work. Blurring the boundaries between body and the environment, the artist allows her subjects’ identities to unfold through their relation to structure, colour, and arrangement of her imagined interiors. Anderson’s non-hierarchical approach allows for contraventions of formal artistic traditions, such as the overlapping of gestures, colours, and patterns. She draws influence from the playful perspectives in European Medieval painting and Korean munbangdo still-lifes to seek balance and containment within her compositions, deconstructing ordinary pictorial illusionism before reforming it into something more expressive.

Anderson’s paintings are composed from personal photographic archives and memories from her time in Korea, Europe, and the United Kingdom, merging moments and geographies on a single canvas to create dream-like scenes. Resisting fixed notions of time and place, the works function as layered reflections of her own evolving sense of self. Simultaneously contemplative and restrained, Anderson’s works offer viewers spaces that feel both deeply personal and quietly universal, where memory, architecture, and identity coalesce.