Full CV

Emily Yong Beck (b. 1999, Daegu, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary ceramic artist who received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2021. Beck’s work has been featured in the solo exhibitions at Gaa Gallery Provincetown, MA; New Image Art, Los Angeles, CA; Lefebvre et Fils, Paris, FR; and The Pit, Los Angeles, CA as well as group exhibitions at Asia Society Texas, Houston, TX and The Korean Cultural Center, Chicago, IL. Beck has been awarded residences at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Newcastle, ME, Township10, Marshall, NC, The Residency Program, Versaille, FR. Beck lives and works in Chicago, IL.  Her work is in the permanent collection of Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. She's represented by The Pit and Gaa Gallery.

Chicago-based ceramicist Emily Yong Beck’s practice transforms familiar characters from Japanese pop culture into something tactile, unruly, and psychologically charged. Built upon forms inspired by traditional Korean pottery, the work merges nostalgia, craft, and cultural memory through Beck’s intentionally imperfect hand-built surfaces and exuberant glazing. Beck collapses distinctions between fine art, fandom, and historical identity, creating sculptures that feel at once joyful, uncanny, and deeply human.