Samantha Yun Wall: ‘What We Leave Behind’ @ SAM

At first glance, the eyes staring out from the center of Samantha Yun Wall’s pasqueflowers look like black-and-white photographs tucked inside the petals. But get close — very close — and you’ll see the eyes in her “Diaspore” series are drawings, rendered with startling, hyperreal precision. It’s one of several quiet surprises in a small but powerful show that explores the slippery nature of memory and identity, the pull of the past and the undertow of grief.

The 2024 Betty Bowen Award winner’s first major solo museum show brings together stark black-and-white drawings and paintings that feel both meticulous and slightly uncanny. Wall draws from Korean folklore and her own experience growing up on army bases with a Korean mother and a Black father, but the work never feels stuck in the past. Silhouetted figures stretch, overlap and sometimes meet your gaze head-on, refusing to fade into the background. Even the dense black fields carry weight. As Wall put it recently, the dark spaces in her work function as “more than negative spaces — they are a place for the eyes to rest.”

The exhibition’s centerpiece, “What We Leave Behind,” is a large, multipaneled work depicting the artist and her mother in layered silhouette, with those eerie pasqueflowers dangling like vines. (The repeated floral motif comes from a Korean folktale about a grandmother’s death, which Wall invokes as a way of grappling with unresolved family grief).

It’s a show about memory and inheritance, but what lingers is how it plays with looking itself — who gets seen, and how.