Se Young Au (b. 1984, Seoul) is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.

Se Young Au’s artistic practice explores how loss can be transformed into something generative—into new ways of imagining worlds, relationships, and futures. As a Korean transnational adopted person, Au approaches grief as something that unfolds across personal experience, cultural history, and geopolitics at once. Their work is shaped by research into Korea’s history under Japanese occupation and the ongoing presence of U.S. military forces, situating their own displacement within broader systems of imposed identity, cultural erasure, and spatial dispossession.

Au’s practice also examines how non-white bodies are treated as resources within systems such as international adoption and the carceral state—intersecting structures that operate through control, extraction, and erasure. Rather than addressing these forces through linear narrative, Au works with digital composites that allow multiple truths and fractured timelines to exist side by side. These nonlinear environments function as quiet interventions—attempts to tend to what has been broken or taken, and to imagine forms of repair that move beyond resolution or closure.

Multisensory experience is central to Au’s work. Color, sound, and scent are used to evoke emotional and embodied responses that resist simple interpretation. Scent, in particular, is an agile and intimate medium—one that moves directly through memory and sensation, bypassing language and binary thinking. Au’s studies at the Institute of Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles have informed their approach to creating immersive installations that act as portals into altered perceptual and emotional states, where viewers are invited to feel rather than decipher.

Collaboration extends these inquiries into shared space and collective experience. As co-founder of Errare, a sensory spatial design studio formed with their partner Kaitlyn Darby, Au develops immersive environments that explore ecological attunement, temporal collapse, and the politics of embodied presence. Across mediums, their work holds a central tension: that devastation and sentience coexist, and that making room for both—without hierarchy—creates the conditions for care, imagination, and possibility.

Au received their BA in photography from Columbia College Chicago. They have exhibited in Seattle at the Henry Art Gallery, AHL Foundation in New York City, El Segundo Museum of Art, The Institute of Art and Olfaction, Craft Contemporary Museum, and RIP Space in Los Angeles. Au was recently a recipient of an Emergency Fund Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. They have been a guest artist lecturer at Cornell University and the University of California at Irvine. Additionally, Au writes a quarterly dispatch, Transmissions, which explores olfaction as a tool for transmuting grief.

Se Young Au - Curriculum Vitae

Biographical 

                b. 1984   Seoul, South Korea

Education

2020                    SMC | visual arts: continuing education |  Santa Monica, CA

2017-present      Institute of Art and Olfaction   | scent certification  |  Los Angeles, CA

2004-2005          Antonio de Nebrija  |  study abroad  | Madrid, Spain

2002-2007          Columbia College Chicago |  Bachelor of Arts  |  Photography  |  Chicago, IL

Guest Artist/Educator

2024                     University of California at Irvine | Irvine, CA

2024 RISD (invited) | Providence, RI

2023 Carlow University | Pittsburgh, PA 

2023 Cornell University: East Asian symposium, artist/guest lecturer  | Ithaca, NY

2022                      HOLA (Heart of Los Angeles) | Los Angeles, CA

Solo Exhibition

2023               Institute of Art and Olfaction | A Clearing | Los Angeles, CA 

Select Group Exhibitions

2026. Scent + Art Festival | Riga, Latvia | (forthcoming)

2025 RIP Space | System Support, fundraiser | Los Angeles, CA

2025 Plot | Materials and Processes for an Expanding World | Los Angeles, CA

2025*             RIP Space | The Shape of Time | Los Angeles, CA 

2025                    Craft Contemporary Museum | Ether | Los Angeles, CA 

2025                    UC Irvine | (Un)natural Confluences | Irvine, CA

2025                    LA County Public Art |  Reflections  | Los Angeles, CA (forthcoming)

2024             Space Mirage | WaladaKan Good, Ssalon | Seoul, South Korea 

2024             PSLA | WaladaKan Good, Ssalon | Los Angeles, CA 

2022             AHL Foundation | Sensoria |  New York, NY 

2022             LA Artcore |  Dear Mother,  | Los Angeles, CA

2022             Luna Anaïs Gallery at D2  |  Radical Dawn |  Los Angeles, CA 

2021             El Segundo Museum of Art  |  blue/s  |  El Segundo, CA

2020             Henry Art Gallery  |  Set in Motion |  Seattle, WA

2015             A+D Gallery  |  Classical Mechanics   |  Chicago, IL

2014                    Benefit for Mutual Aid  |  Auction |  Brooklyn, NY

2012                    Societe Alexandra Sens  | Treadwash  |  Paris, France

2011                    Wandering Bears  | Sunnyside Up |  Margate, UK

2010             First Eyes Festival |  Chain Letter  |  Paris, France

2010                    Chicago: Next |  Proximity |  Chicago, IL  

2010                    Zhou B Center |  Territories  |  Chicago, IL

2009                    Version/ Co-Prosperity Sphere  |  Silent Auction |  Chicago, IL

2007                    Raw Space   |  Manifest- BFA Show   |  Chicago, IL

Published essays/ interviews

2024                    Dialogues | Interview with Clifford Prince King | Foundwork 

2024                    Transmissions | The Ways in Which to Reach You | Varyer

2023             Transmissions | Scenting the Multiverse | Varyer

2022             Transmissions | Shapes of Perception |  Varyer

              Transmissions | Seeds of Transference | Varyer 

2021                    Transmissions | Volume 1 | Varyer 

Selected Press

2023             Noodle | Issue 4 | Interview with Kenneth Ng 

2023                    The Art Direction Show | Artist Interview

2022                    New York Times  |  Can Scent Be Democratized?   | by Betty Hallock

2021                    El Segundo Museum of Art | Artist Interview

Distinctions

2025             Recipient of Emergency Fund Grant | Foundation of Contemporary Arts

2023                    Fountainhead Residency nominee 

2022             Fountainhead Residency nominee 

*in collaboration with Errare Studio