Ever since I met Sun K. Kwak at the Brooklyn Museum two weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about how she found her signature medium — matte black masking tape that she uses in such quantities that she has it custom made in a variety of widths.

The soft-spoken, mild-mannered artist, who was born in Korea and moved to New York in 1993 to pursue a master’s degree at New York University, described a long struggle to close the distance she felt from the materials she was working with at the time. After years of frustration, dissatisfaction, and experimentation with different mediums, the tape idea came to her one morning in a flash; by afternoon she’d created her first work with it, and she felt freer and more gratified than she had in years.

What I’ve been thinking is: Shouldn’t we all be so lucky as to find our own black tape?

Kwak has gone on to create site-specific installations at venues ranging from the Queens Museum of Art and Drawing Center in New York to Korea’s Gwangju Biennale to the House of World Culture in Berlin. Her latest, titled Enfolding 280 Hours, opens at the Brooklyn Museum this week.

Since February, she has been working, alone and with assistants, to fill the museum’s fifth-floor rotunda with an installation made up of some three miles of the custom tape. The piece comprises two elements: a circuit of wavelike imagery that spans the rotunda’s outer walls, and, on the space’s four pillars, patterns that are similar except that the tape becomes negative space, encasing wispy, smoky tendrils. For the former, Kwak works relatively freestyle, creating her expressionistic line work as she goes. For the latter, she projects a hand-drawn design onto a solid field of the black tape, then cuts away pieces to achieve the vision.  

ARTINFO visited Kwak while she was installing Enfolding 280 Hours, which opened to the public March 27 and runs through July 5. After that, the tape will be removed from the walls and thrown away.

Click on the photogallery at left for start-to-finish shots from the installation process.

Sun, why did you choose to work with tape?

I started as a painter, but somehow I was unhappy that I had this gap between me and the material. I couldn’t reduce the distance. So I was searching for different materials and ways of expression.

First I started using cutout canvases. Then, my work became much more expressionistic; I think it was more about exploring my frustration. I did feel a little free then, but when I moved to New York, I thought, that era is over, the same work can’t be produced here.

I started thinking about time and space a lot and how you feel different in different spaces and how that affects me emotionally. I was still working in pen and ink every day, but I also started drawing with wire directly in space, and with various plastic tubes, thread — all kinds of linear things. And then I did some performance, but I still wasn’t satisfied. I was struggling a lot and was very unhappy.

Then one morning it just popped up. I was searching for a material that was direct and simple: no pretension, no trying to be cool, just the most humble and essential element for me to draw with. I ran to Chinatown to get a bunch of masking tape — the cheap kind (I use the expensive kind now) — and I went back to my school and I started tearing the tape off and drawing with it in the hallway, all the way up to the rooftop. I was so happy. I felt so free, like this is it. This is for me.

How long ago was that?

That was 1995. At first I was just working with tape on the side, because I didn’t have enough space. But then I started to get exhibitions in different places, and I thought, since I don’t have a studio, I’ll just make a temporary studio wherever I go. So whenever I get an exhibition, I just put a bunch of tape in my bag and go.

Your work looks a little like woodcut.

Sometimes I hear that from people — or calligraphy. I can’t really say there is a big influence for my work, though.

What do you think about while you’re working?

Sometimes I work in complete quietness. Sometimes I listen to music, though I’m not really listening — I’m just trying to block the noise around me, focus, and empty myself.

So you don’t really think about it, you just let it flow?

That’s right. Sometimes I follow the line, and sometimes I lead the line. It’s both. That’s the attraction for me of making impromptu drawings. I’m not tracing my idea exactly, but I have a rough idea, and it grows from there.

The title of your work here suggests it would take 280 hours to install. How did you arrive at that number?

“280 Hours” is just a symbol, it’s not literal. Probably it’ll be more.

Will you finish in time?

I have to. I’m really pushing myself.

I see you’re wearing a brace. Did you hurt your wrist?

If you keep doing the same motion over and over, you can hurt yourself, so I ask everyone involved in my work to wear a brace like this. One time I really hurt myself, and I had to go to an acupuncturist. It worked, but once you hurt some part of your body it’s weakened, and the pain comes back. So I protect myself. When I go home I take a hot bath with Epsom salts to relax my muscles. Only then am I able to eat something.

You work hard!

But I enjoy it. It’s when I feel alive.

What do you want visitors to get from the project?

The ultimate goal for my projects is sharing. I don’t want to make people read a specific message or try to describe something — I want them to walk into the picture and have their own experience in a new pictorial reality, and expand their own time and space. That’s the moment my work is complete.