Young Hee Sung is a multidisciplinary artist and the founder and director of Laird Art Gallery in Toronto. Her work combines Korean brush painting with Western abstraction through a practice she calls Brush Densityism — building surfaces through the slow accumulation of countless dots, lines, and brushstrokes, giving shape to memory, emotion, and time. Her work spans themes of environment, healing, and cultural identity, connecting the personal with the shared. @sungyounghee
Painting is the foundation of her practice. As a gallerist and curator, she develops exhibitions that merge visual art with the written word, and founded Laird Art Link — a gathering of artists and writers whose creative voices converge through talks, collaborative projects, and cross-disciplinary events.
She has exhibited in Toronto, Los Angeles, New Jersey, and Seoul, with invited solo exhibitions at City of Toronto public galleries including Cedar Ridge Creative Centre Gallery and Assembly Hall Gallery, and at Ajax City Hall, as well as at her own Laird Art Gallery. She has presented at ICOM-CC: Routes to Resilience, an international conference of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), and participated in a public diplomacy project funded by the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs introducing Korean art and culture to North America. Her work on the intersection of art, environment, and spirituality is forthcoming in the Handbook of Sustainability and Spirituality, co-authored with an environmental scholar.
Since 2019, she has led healing art programs in partnership with nonprofits and schools including All Seeds Academy and MFCC, drawing on her graduate studies and personal experience to connect inner life, intergenerational experience, and shared cultural space through art. As a member of the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA) and the Korean Artists Society of Canada (KASC), she engages in ongoing cultural dialogue between Korean and Canadian contemporary art communities.