Artist Profile Kelly Haejung Paik

Paik’s evocative, buttery hues stage a hushed theatre of objects.

Artist Statement

This painting is an homage to Salvador Dalí, reimagining the surreal environments he conjured while shifting their dialogue on permanence and impermanence. While Dalí’s motifs often suggest time’s fluidity and dreamlike distortions, I introduce elements that further challenge stability—juxtaposing the ephemeral with the eternal. A flower, fragile and fleeting, exists within a landscape where objects endure beyond human temporality. A clock without hands suspends time altogether, neither marking its passage nor defining its boundaries.

In this space, everything coexists—mortality and timelessness, presence and dissolution. The stillness of objects contrasts with the inevitability of change, questioning whether permanence is an illusion or a quiet persistence beyond human perception. By blending familiar surrealist iconography with my own visual language, I seek to invite reflection on the forces that shape existence, where time is both absent and ever-present, and where the material world continues to live beyond us.

Artist Biography

Kelly Haejung Paik, Ph.D., born in Seoul, Korea, now lives and works in Seattle, WA. Though her academic journey initially took a different path, her lifelong connection to the visual arts deepened through her work as an educator and studies under influential artists.

Paik’s practice blends scientific inquiry with intuition, drawing inspiration from nature, human-made objects, music, and science. Working across realism, abstraction, and surrealism, she explores the agency of objects and their capacity to shape human experience and cultural memory. Her materials range from canvas and wood to metal and three-dimensional tessellations, reinforcing the interplay between structure and fluidity.

In her surreal paintings, Paik constructs enigmatic spaces where objects transcend their conventional roles, dissolving the boundaries between reality and dream. Her compositions investigate shifting perspectives, temporal ambiguity, and the silent presence of forms imbued with a life of their own. By reimagining the interplay between space and matter, her work explores the fluid nature of time, where the environment remains in flux while objects persist with a quiet, enduring presence. These forms exist beyond the limitations of human perception, embodying a continuity that stretches across generations, histories, and shifting landscapes. In doing so, her paintings invite reflection on the unseen forces that shape our understanding of existence—suggesting that objects are not merely passive artifacts but active participants in the unfolding of time and memory.