Image: Seattle Art Museum
The 2024 Betty Bowen Award winner’s solo exhibition closes next month.
Wall’s monochrome artworks—haunting, mysterious, and emotional—embrace uncertainty and the unknown as tools in her ongoing investigation of identity and history. Her new paintings use overlapping silhouettes of female figures as portals to unknown spaces and different temporal realms. 'What We Leave Behind' is identified as a 2025 work by Samantha Yun Wall, Korean/American, born in 1977, made with ink and conté crayon on Claybord.
The impetus for the new body of work is a Korean folk tale in which the Pasque flower symbolizes a grandmother who died without the loving care of her grandchildren. The story centers on melancholy, loss, and remembrance. In some paintings, Wall gives the plant a surreal aspect by replacing the flower’s center with a watchful eye.
Wall has long examined the personal narratives of people born to Asian women and US service members during military occupation in Asia. She is mindful that these Amerasian children are stigmatized, and that Black Amerasians face even greater stigma. Her stark black-and-white figures alternate between invisibility and hypervisibility as she examines cultural taboos that perpetuate secrecy and silence.
Samantha Yun Wall: What We Leave Behind is on view from February 5 through October 4, 2026, at the Seattle Art Museum’s Third Floor Galleries.
