Kwonny is a Seattle-based artist born in New York whose practice began while she was living in Australia, where she was first drawn to the local flora and fauna. Her canvases feature animals and mythic figures depicted mid-fight or mid-flight, often involving stretched material and surface tension. Her use of negative space functions as both compositional and conceptual device, holding the friction between history and mythology, predator and prey, domestication and wildness.

Her commission for Australia draws on her experience as a Korean-American negotiating the effects of dual cultures and migration. Her work is shaped by years moving between the Pacific Northwest and Australia, and the piece holds the question of who counts as Australian and who carries Australia with them. It is made by an artist who has lived inside the answer.

Instagram: @kwonny.art