ArtX Contemporary is proud to present a selection of work by Samantha Yun Wall, recipient of Seattle Art Museum’s 2024 Betty Bowen Award. Through highly detailed monochromatic drawings, Wall explores transcultural identity, drawing on her multiracial background and East Asian and Western storytelling traditions to examine hybridity, transformation, and feminine power.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the United States, Wall investigates migration, belonging, and the construction of self. Working in ink, charcoal, and conté crayon, she creates striking black-and-white compositions in which silhouetted, doubled, and fragmented figures visualize the tensions between visibility and erasure, intimacy and distance. Centering the body as a site of negotiation, her figures face, mirror, and touch—suggesting both connection and division—while probing how identity is shaped through perception, memory, mythology, and inherited histories.
Based in Portland, Oregon, Wall graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is the recipient of awards and grants from the Seattle Art Museum, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Oregon Arts Commission. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Frye Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Boise Art Museum, ICA Maine, New Orleans Museum of Art, the CUE Art Foundation in New York, and the Hangaram Art Museum at the Seoul Arts Center in South Korea. Wall’s solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum is currently on view through October 2026. Her work will be included in the 2025 Outwin Triennial at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Akron Art Museum recently acquired a major work. Wall’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, Portland Art Museum, Northern Arizona University Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Whatcom Museum, and other public and private collections.
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