Peter Williams Awardees

2024 Awardee: Myungah Hyon

Myungah Hyon—an incredible artist, teacher, and collaborator—is the first honorary recipient of the Peter Williams Award, which was introduced in 2022 in memory of its namesake. Through conversations with Hyon, her co-teacher Jeanine Coupe Ryding, a former TA, students, and more, Hyon’s curiosity, generosity, and hunger for the arts and the arts’ community shines with warmth and brilliance.

Over the years Hyon has shown numerous students the art of bookmaking and granted them the tools to fall in love with and tend to the craft well. She has continued to push the boundaries of the medium and collaborates with those she sees doing the same. Both her mentors and mentees look to her as an inspiration and dear friend. Here’s a glimpse of Hyon in studio, classroom, and collaboration.

Hyon in the studio: “There’s an air of determination,” Former TA Chang Yuchen described in Hyon. Yuchen recognizes that it takes a tenacity to balance teaching and creating. Hyon’s co-teacher, Jeanine Coupe Ryding, recognized this as a gift with Hyon as well, describing it as a “boundless energy” that she admired. Both Ryding and Yuchen spoke with admiration about the creative initiative that Hyon has taken over the years, always bringing new twists, while still holding reverence for an age-old craft. A classic example of this is Hyon’s phone book sculptures. “It's always been inspiring. She's always come up with things that are very natural for the medium. But very creative. Just when you think you know what bookbinding and sculpture are about. She starts doing something very different. ” Ryding said in reference to the phone books. Under Hyon’s manipulation these structures have evolved the ordinary objects into something far beyond.

Ryding remembers her first impression of Hyon as a person of quiet and vibrant enthusiasm. This same note thrums through her work. “She hungers for the creative time,” Ryding said. Hyon finds a boundless fascination with all things artbook related, “It’s a life learning process to really invest [in] how to work with the different materials.” One of Hyon’s most recent collections of work Connecting showcases Hyon’s explorations. Employing woodwork, ceramic, printmaking, and more, the exhibition showed the work of an artist who continues to find joy and novelty amidst an ever evolving practice.

Hyon in the classroom: On one of Hyon’s first days teaching at Ox-Bow, she greeted students with an enthusiastic lecture. Her co-teacher, Jeanine Coupe Ryding, described her quick words and grandiose hand gestures as students' eyes grew wider and wider. When Ryding suggested Hyon slow down a bit, she took the advice in stride, laughed and apologized to the students for her mistake. Ryding chuckled while recounting the story, adding that “after that point, everybody [in the course] was a lot more relaxed.” Hyon, simply by acknowledging her fervor, captured the trust of her students in that first session. Such an ability is transformational to the studios at Ox-Bow, where students only have one to two weeks to develop a connection to course material, peers, and faculty.

Of course, Hyon’s impact on students expands well beyond Ox-Bow. Chang Yuchen worked during her first year of graduate school as Hyon’s TA. Ten years later Yuchen says, “I actually think about [Hyon] and her teaching on a daily basis.” At the time, Yuchen had no formal experience with bookbinding; “[Hyon] very generously accepted me [as her TA],” Yuchen said, and through that generosity Yuchen’s creative pursuits were set in a new direction. She saw that for those who took Hyon’s courses “it really raised the bar for how much [one] could accomplish… that has been continuously inspiring in my [own] teaching.”

Hyon in collaboration: Hyon sees students and teaching assistants not merely as students, but as artists in their own right. This lens has led Hyon to invite former TA, Chang Yuchen and Li Han to co-create a publication with her. Yuchen cited how impactful the four year process of collaborating on Book Book was to her relationship with Hyon. “She’s a role model,” Yuchen said. Hyon is far from naive to the importance of the mentor-mentee dynamic. As someone who was eventually able to teach with her own mentor, Jeanine Coupe Ryding, Hyon hopes to set a similar precedent with her mentees.  Book Book was eventually published by Printer Matter and has since sold out of four editions. Yuchen, who went on to accomplish several residencies, publications, and now also teaches at the university level, was not shy to give credit to Hyon’s impact on her trajectory.

Throughout their time collaborating together, Yuchen particularly valued the care that Hyon showed for Yuchen beyond her artistic pursuits. “She always asked me if I was eating okay, which in an East Asian context is a love language.” Ryding similarly took note of Hyon’s fostering spirit, “She has a good heart,” one that Ryding noted has stayed intact throughout many years in academia. This attitude of care for the person at the center of the artist, echoes back to the award’s namesake, and it seems an easy assumption that Williams would applaud Hyon’s nomination.

Image Credits

Myungah Hyon instructs a class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Photos by Natia Ser, Summer Fellow