Jill
Kyong

Jill Kyong makes relief art, sculpture, and furniture from carefully selected hardwoods — maple, cherry, walnut, ash, cedar — building up layered geometric forms that hold a dialogue between light and shadow. Each piece begins with a photograph she has taken of the natural world, which she flattens into abstracted geometric shapes. She then uses precision woodworking to construct those forms into three-dimensional space, intersecting the visual logic of landscape with the truths she observes in human experience.

A recurring element in her work is the wood stone: shaped and sanded until every edge disappears, smooth as river rock. Placed together, the stones read as strength and connection; isolated, they carry a quality of solitude. This tension between the organic roundness of the stones and the hard geometric lines of the surrounding compositions is central to what Kyong calls her primary themes — duality, the coexistence of strength and weakness, and the fundamental human need to connect.

Kyong received her BFA from the University of Minnesota with a focus on sculpture and metal casting in 1997. After a period away from studio practice, she returned to artmaking in 2017, taking up woodworking and teaching at the Arkansas Arts Center (now the Windgate Art School in Little Rock). She now lives and works in Moscow, Idaho, and holds post-baccalaureate credentials from the University of Idaho. Her work has been recognized with a Juror's Merit Award at the Boise Art Museum Triennial (2020) and shown at the Wharton Esherick Museum, among other institutions.

The critic Christopher Schnoor, writing in the Boise Weekly, described her work as echoing “the precisionist aesthetic of early 20th-century American art with their machined look, smooth surfaces and crisp materiality,” noting that her “smart, strong rectilinear compositions in dark and light wood, accented by precisely milled stones of maple, are beautifully executed.”