David Heo is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves across painting, collage, installation, murals, and public and collaborative projects. His work considers how inherited histories become entangled with personal memory and contemporary experience. Drawing from Korean folklore alongside Western painting traditions, Heo creates layered compositions that move between the intimate and the cinematic. Familiar scenes and figures are transformed through recollection, becoming charged with tension and a shifting sense of belonging.

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Snarling dogs, anxious tigers, and fleeing rabbits recur throughout Heo’s work. Rather than functioning as fixed symbols, these figures behave more like characters whose emotional positions are constantly changing. They can appear vulnerable or aggressive, fearful or resilient, sometimes occupying several states at once. Their shifting relationships create a psychological tension in which affection can sit beside anxiety and warmth can surface within moments of unease. Through these figures, Heo gives physical form to feelings that might otherwise remain difficult to locate.

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Color operates as both atmosphere and emotional structure. Heo draws from nature, Korean visual traditions, and the heightened colors of memory, using saturation and contrast to create movement and emotional friction. Brightness in his work does not resolve unease. Pleasure and discomfort remain present together. Heo approaches color as a form of vitality and public generosity, creating warmth and recognition while allowing the complexity of an image to remain unresolved.

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Memory in Heo’s work is active rather than archival. Images and stories are carried forward, altered over time, and placed into new relationships with one another. The past rarely appears intact. Instead, fragments of cultural history meet personal experience in the present, allowing identity and belonging to remain fluid rather than settled.

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Heo’s practice also extends beyond the studio through murals, collaborations, and participatory projects. In these settings, the pictorial world of his paintings enters physical space and becomes something people can move through and encounter as part of daily life. Scale and color can alter the atmosphere of a place, while narrative remains open enough for viewers to form their own relationships with the imagery. Whether encountered in a gallery, across the surface of a building, or within a shared interior, Heo is interested in the moment an image becomes part of its surroundings and begins to change how that space is experienced.

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Born and raised in Georgia, David Heo developed his practice in Chicago. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Realation Space in Seoul (2024), Hashimoto Contemporary in New York (2023), and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids (2023). His work has also appeared in group exhibitions at the Korean Cultural Center of Chicago (2025), the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago (2022), and Half Gallery in Los Angeles (2022). He has created commissioned projects with organizations and brands including Vans, Lotte Hotel, and the Chicago Bulls. His work has been featured in publications including Vogue Portugal and VISLA Magazine.