featured artists
Echoes of home
Step inside Kayoon Anderson’s hybrid home.
Born in Seoul, Kayoon Anderson first came to London at the age of two, when her family relocated to New Malden, also known as Korea Town. Many of her friends from the local Korean community are connected by narratives of migration, their early childhood memories featuring the shared hallmarks of objects and cultural experiences. From the fallen leaves of Ginkgo trees to the bold and beautiful attire of Korean ajumma, their artistic motifs bring traces of Korea into contact with the present day, enabling them to co-create a collective yet distinctly hybrid and personal sense of home.
In 2020, Kayoon participated in the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year competition. As an amateur artist at the time, this event opened her eyes to London’s immense concentration of global creatives, most of whom are incredibly generous in sharing the fruits of their cultural heritage, lived experiences, and industry expertise. Studying portraiture at Heatherley’s School of Art further introduced Kayoon to London-based figurative and portrait artists, and through studying City and Guilds, she met individuals working with an array of media and subject matter. In many respects, Kayoon’s sense of identity and practice has been shaped more by this active creative community than the city of London itself.
Kayoon’s imagined, intimate interiors and thematic explorations of identity and longing are informed by her background in architecture and mixed-heritage upbringing. Looking to a combination of European medieval and traditional Korean art, and mixing photographic elements and memories from her time in the UK, Europe, and South Korea, she puzzle-pieces together depictions of loved ones with objects, patterns and colors that hold personal regard.
In Daughterhood Scene in Green (2024), Kayoon depicts a folding screen influenced by Korean byung-poog, traversing the shifting dynamics between her mother and grandmother as they got older and duties of care reversed. Although the figures in this piece are Kayoon’s family members, and the setting is based on her grandmother’s flat in South Korea, they evoke a universal sense of what it is like to be part of a parent-child relationship and watch your nearest and dearest age over time.
Kayoon’s recent body of work, Echoes of Home, explores familial history alongside daily life in the UK. In this quiet, grounded, and contextually fluid space, she reflects upon intergenerational ties and an intimate sense of self as they continue to evolve on canvas and beyond.
