Danielle Sung — Ratrock Magazine

Feature by Sayuri Govender

Photos by Will Park

Danielle Sung is a freshman at Columbia College. In her work, she illuminates the voices of marginalized groups who have been impacted by current day events. She hopes that the radical figures and techniques she uses in her work can be catalysts for social change. Sung is currently focused on installation work, and has created numerous astounding pieces with charged political meaning. Today, I talked with her about her exploration of new mediums, balancing the personal and the political, and finding the best burrata in NYC.
What is your creative process like?

It's kind of complicated for me, because I feel like I have grown and changed so much as an artist over the years. I started off with still life painting, which is pretty natural, just painting what I see. And then I shifted to portraits, which are also pretty simple, because I didn't have any real artistic inspiration. Then, I was introduced to other mediums besides oil paint in my junior year of high school. The discovery of these materials allowed me to start exploring beyond still-life or portraits. I was able to discern what I think is valuable and what I think should be portrayed in a painting.

When I started making my college portfolio in my senior year of high school, my teacher showed me this quote by James Baldwin, which has stuck with me deeply. Baldwin says the precise role of an artist is to “illuminate darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lost sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place”. After hearing that, I suddenly felt that my art could be a catalyst for change.

On a similar note, what inspires you as an artist?

I can't speak for myself now because I'm going through an artistic slump. I haven't created art in over a year, which I feel really guilty about. But during the pandemic, I created art nonstop. I was locked in my room and I was depressed; I felt trapped physically and mentally, because I was away from all my friends from my high school in New Hampshire and was back home in Korea for the first time in two years. I needed an outlet to take out my stress and express my feelings of sadness and isolation. I started following the news about Covid, and saw all these horrific deaths happening. That became a catalyst for my art: it prompted me to give those people I heard about in the news a voice, because we were all trapped. So I thought my art would be a radical way for me to express my thoughts and also give other people the voice they deserved.

How did switching from a personal to a global and political lens in your art impact you as an artist?

I still have a lot of trouble when finding the boundary between the personal and the public aspects of art. Art itself is very performative, since it's meant to be consumed by an audience, but I also want to create art for myself without focusing on who the audience will be. I feel like that's what I really leaned towards throughout my entire life. All throughout my life, until high school, I created a lot of art about me, my identity, my interests, all while exploring the medium that I liked the most.

However, ever since the pandemic, I realized I needed to be more aware of my surroundings and less concerned with solely my life. I started realizing how little knowledge I had about political and societal aspects of our world. I became really focused on those aspects of our world through talking about it with other people, asking people questions about their own thoughts and what, objectively, was going on, and reading the headlines on my phone. These headlines would always be about deaths, Black Lives Matter, and other global riots going on. I felt that these shouldn't be suppressed to just one headline, and that they could be much bigger. That's why I chose to create these types of activist artworks in a grandiose way. I had never done installations before, but I felt that a single canvas wouldn't suffice for all of it. I was able to develop my own thoughts and then express those in my own paintings. But it was a very gradual process. And I feel like I'm still working on that.

During that time, you shifted from canvas work to installations and ink. What was the process like transitioning into those mediums?

Until my second year of high school, I was really fixated on oil paintings, especially because I did a lot of that art in Korea. In Korea, they teach excellent technique, but it's very restrictive and there’s not a lot of space for medium exploration. You must look at something and paint it exactly the way it is. So I really thought that all my life oil painting would be it, or at least just drawing what I see. However, in high school, I had these two really wonderful art teachers who introduced me to other aspects of art and different mediums. At that point I fell in love with mediums such as fabric and ink, and started incorporating them into my art. It was small scale experimentation at first, but then I tried something big for the first time by buying an entire roll of fabric and painting on it. I thought it would be scary, but it was very liberating. Then I realized that a canvas boundary wasn't it for me, and that there's so much more out there I wanted to explore limitlessly. Now, I don't think I can ever go back to a single canvas!

That's incredible! You talked about growing up in Korea and then coming to the U.S. for high school. What role do those identities play in the art you create?

I've always been really confused about my cultural identity because I was born in New York and I lived here for the first few years of my life. Because of that my family still knows a lot of people in the city. So I've always thought of New York as my home. When I went back to Korea, I attended an international school for middle school, which had a lot of English and a lot of American culture while also being in a separate geographical area. However, when I came back to high school here, I had to deal with identity crises and cultural confusion. My school in New Hampshire was incredibly diverse, thankfully, but it was just an adjustment for me, to actually live here by myself, with the rest of my family being back home in Korea. I dealt with these feelings in my earlier paintings, where I drew myself plastering Korean fabric around in the background. Through that type of art, I began to gain more clarity about my identity. Thus I stopped exploring it as my art progressed. It's now more about the world, other people, and their identities. So it's a shift from the personal to the public.

Do you ever see yourself reflected in your exploration of others?

In most of my most recent artworks, I tried to take an objective lens on the world. I tell people that I try to paint my pieces concerning societal topics and worldly events in an objective lens, but honestly, that’s something that I’ve been working on finding the balance for. For a while, I just felt so overwhelmed with emotions when I was making art to the point where I just couldn’t really create anything I felt satisfied with. So I just put down my ink brush and I just gave myself a few weeks to take deep breaths and reflect on my main reason for creating art. I ultimately tried approaching my art in an “objective” lens, in hope that I could possibly refrain from being the main character of these larger societal problems that I am not the biggest victim of. Like for my COVID installation piece, I was aiming to capture the loss of millions due to the pandemic. Although I am second handedly affected due to the larger scope of the effects COVID-19 has had on us, I am not the one that should be the central character: the victims are those who have passed away whilst fighting for their lives. Likewise, when depicting those riots dealing with Black and/or queer lives, as an individual who does not identify as those racial or sexual identities, the most I can do is express my deepest and genuine sympathy. I cannot try portraying these events in my artworks by putting myself in their shoes cause I’m just not them. That’s what I mean by trying to refrain from self-opinion or the subjective in my pieces. My sympathy still exists and hopefully it is expressed through my artworks. After all, that’s the essence of my pieces: I just want to follow Baldwin’s words and “illuminate” the “darkness” and make the world “a more human dwelling place.” I just feel like there is a difference between creating a piece that is poignant and sympathetic versus creating art by trying to relate to the individuals and those immediately affected by these incidents.

A lot of your art is centered around uncomfortable conversations. How do you find comfort in the uncomfortable?

Finding comfort in the uncomfortable is done by talking about those uncomfortable things. That can be talking it out by yourself, with others, or through art. I was very, very shy–until middle school at least–so I tried to suppress all my thoughts and my feelings to myself and I ultimately felt really trapped in that. I saw that I wasn't really making any progress in my thoughts. However, talking about the stuff I wanted to talk about with people that would listen and not judge is how I expanded my horizons and expanded my thoughts. Everyone has different thoughts about different things. The fact that you can talk about it with them and understand your differences is what makes you closer and what makes you more grounded in the world. In terms of art, expressing my own thoughts, or the lack thereof–because as I said, mine was pretty objective–is a perfect way to really find comfort in the uncomfortable.

What message do you wish to convey with your art?

I just hope that someone–at least one person–finds a voice for themselves by resonating with whatever I create. I want them to see my art and then find comfort in the ability to express their own opinions or ideas in the way I did, and through whatever medium they want. Whether it's just going up and talking to another person about what they saw, writing it out, or creating art like I did, I hope they can expand their own thoughts from seeing mine.

Are there any artistic practices that you want to explore in the future?

I want art to be a part of my life forever. This past winter break, when I was having doubts about my artistic career, my mom motivated me to create artwork for our home. She wanted me to create this really huge art piece for the living room. So, I took two straight days and created this very abstract white plaster piece that I never thought I would be creating, and that kind of flicked a light bulb in my head. I've never created abstract artwork before, but I really enjoyed it and can see myself exploring it.

I can still imagine myself going back to being an artist when I'm 60 or something and just creating art while sitting on the patio. I'm just hoping that the works I've created will be the starting pieces of my future artistic career. I definitely have more that I want to create, it's just a matter of me getting myself into a studio and grinding it all out, while also going through the college experience.

What do you think is your favorite piece you've created and why?

I'd say this piece called Mr. President. It's very heavy and not as big as people would think. I just cut up a bunch of magazines and glued them together, having fun with the different patterns and the colors that are displayed in the edges. It made my hands so messy, and they were very burnt by the end of the two weeks that I worked on it. My hands were the grossest ever! But, I feel like because of that, I was so proud of my result. It's stuff like that I never thought I would be creating because of how restricted I was with myself and the medium. So trying stuff like that was just really, really entertaining to me. And I feel like that piece especially was just a very nice intersection of my interest in politics, media--as in videos and magazines-- and mixed media materials. It was a very fun piece to mess with!

You’re not just an artist, but also a major food connoisseur. I saw that you've been looking for the best burrata in New York City since you’ve moved here. Have you found it? Tell me more!

Oh, my goodness, I am so excited you asked this! I created a burrata account on Instagram a few weeks ago (@theburratatologist). I've started rating every burrata I've eaten in the past, and I'm actually going to eat three burratas this weekend. I'm definitely still on the search. I have four posts so far and it's still an ongoing process. I feel like New York's the perfect city for this. So I'm very, very invested. Maybe I should take that effort and put it in my art, haha! I'm very dedicated to it.

How can Ratrock readers learn more about you and your art?

They can reach me through my website daniellejsung.com and/or Instagram (@daniellesung)!

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