Tina Kim Gallery announces the exhibit, “Deep is the rising sun, Far is the Falling one”, the first New York solo exhibition of Kang Seok Ho (1971-2021).
Kang Seok Ho is an artist who investigated and probed the medium of painting through the simple and everyday premise around the act of “seeing.” For example, in his 2006 solo exhibition at Kumho Museum of Art in Seoul, he exhibited over forty paintings that repeatedly depicted an image taken from a photograph showing the backside of someone wearing a checkered green jacket with their hands clasped behind them. For Kang, painting begins with an interior meditation on the question of how to approach and portray subject matter, rather than a question regarding its content.
This exhibition will focus on Kang’s “Attire” series, which marks Kang’s first investigations in painting that began in Germany and continued until his untimely death in 2021. First prompted by a drawing Kang did in 1999 of his friend’s sweater while sitting across from each other at a cafe, these works are based on photos Kang took, then cut, re-angled, and enlarged on the canvas. Kang left out from the frame narrative features such as a person’s face, the surrounding background, and focused rather on formal details such as color, pattern, texture, and wrinkles of fabric as it moves along the curves of the body, creating a unique visual language.
In referring to his own paintings of white trousers or denim pants, he has alluded to thinking about white porcelain or rocky landscapes, meaning that he thought of his work as being closer to landscape rather than portraiture. Furthermore, Kang Seok Ho placed great emphasis on the methodologies involving surface preparation as well as brushwork. Considering the absorbency of paint, he was particular about the type of linen he used and devised a method of layering thinned paint several times on the surface. The brush strokes serve to reveal and resemble the weaving and materiality of the canvas more than showing the colors or shapes depicted on it. On the canvas where one encounters the physicality of his brushstrokes pressed and rubbed with color, representation and description feel far from his intent. While Kang’s work may fit into the category of realism, the sense of transparency where light and air seems to flow and move through without constraint is emblematic of Kang’s distinct aesthetic and his sense of lyricism in the everyday.
“That starts with just seeing. I have a penchant for the act of seeing.”
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