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Excerpt from Penn Stater Magazine:

“IT WASN’T UNTIL ARTIST POSOON PARK SUNG WAS GETTING ready for a show at the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery at the University of Tampa that she real- ized the works she had chosen had a common theme: All were inspired by her third recurrence of breast cancer. The diagnosis, she writes in her artist’s statement, “increased my desire to visually communicate my experiences … by demonstrating the importance of both life and death. One can see darkness, and ultimately optimism in the light of these paintings. I have learned that light is only meaningful when there is darkness.”

Park Sung ’83 MFA A&A was already an established painter when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992. She had exhibited her work in museums from Harris- burg, Pa., to Japan and had won the Tokyo Exhibition Award from Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. And her illness didn’t stop her from painting—it simply steered her in a new direction. She hoped to show that illnesses like cancer can be viewed in a positive light. Suffering and death don’t have to be the opposite of life, says Park Sung—they can enhance it: “For through them, we find great strength and wisdom.”

And hope. After a 14-year struggle, Park Sung, who has a studio in New York and who teaches at the University of Tampa, is now in remission for the third time.”

More coming soon…