The artist on quitting the client-pleasing grind, sticking to a regular drawing habit, finding vitality in art-making, and building enormous, hand-cut paper flowers on the floor.
“In an age when almost anything can be copied, what, if anything, cannot be copied?” That question is what guides Ayong Son‘s current project, Unfinished Finished. “With an AI, almost anything can be copied or imitated. But can someone copy the story of my life? Can they copy the time I spend making a single image? Can they copy the space in which I work? And can they copy me as a person?”
Born in Seoul, Son trained at the Paju Typography Institute and the Basel School of Design before launching her own studio in 2018, working across branding, editorial and web design. But as the studio grew, she found herself managing people more than making things, and constantly compromising her own visual instincts for a client’s preferences. “I gradually felt that the work I was doing was moving further and further away from the direction I wanted to pursue,” she says. So, to make a fix, she decided to change her environment – and, in 2026, she relocated to Berlin, dropped client work, and started making the images and stories she wanted to tell.
Son’s new routine is repetitive but utterly satisfying, and it involves drawing five things every day to keep herself loose and open to the creative process. “If I make something bad today, I can always draw five more things tomorrow,” she says. She’s also stopped trying to nail a drawing in one go, taking a cue from Paul Cézanne’s habit of painting the same subject repeatedly. What’s more is there’s a line from Constantin Brancusi, which she found via the artist Paul Cox, that sums it all up: “It is not difficult to make beautiful things. What is difficult is to create the conditions for making beautiful things.”
You can see that thinking play out in the two works Son picked as favourites – a pair of large-scale floor pieces built entirely from hand-cut paper circles. One blooms in hot pink and red, clusters of flowers pushing up through trailing green stems; the other softens into pale pink and buttery yellow. Both are photographed from directly above in mid-construction with masking tape, plastic sheeting and studio clutter left in shot.
“I do not clean up the marks left on the floor or the surrounding mess,” Son says, “so that the way I am actually working and the process itself can remain visible.” The images, though, could technically be copied – which is something she admits – but recreating them at the same scale and with the same time and beautiful mess behind them… well that’s another matter. “The moment someone tries to copy the process itself, the time, context and sense of authenticity contained within it disappear.”
Son describes being drawn to work that sits between opposites – “completeness and incompleteness, retro and modern, classic and pop” – which becomes visible in the floor pieces. They’re slow, exact, hand-crafted circles that depict a loose, almost accidental blooming shape made by a highly intuitive process. A methodology that fits with her view on the power of art.
“I believe it has the power to help us live just as much as food, clothing and shelter. Art can bring vitality into our lives, inspire us, give us new motivation, and sometimes create beautiful moments. I can also make us think about things we may never have considered before and allow us to see and experience life in a broader and deeper way.”
