12 Nov 2009 — 12 Dec 2009
Seokho kang
seokho kang

Gallery 2 presents Seokho Kang’s solo show.Since around 1999, Seokho Kang has painted a specific part of the human figure under the theme of ‘clothes.’ When strolling the streets or waiting on line, Kang finds something interesting, often a fragment of the appearance of the passers-by from behind?the clothes caught up between the buttocks, the thick curly hair, etc. It seems rather curious that despite his method to enlarge a part of the human figure onto the large canvas his work begins not from the human body but from the clothes.

While the audience pays attention to the peculiar topic and the odd composition from socio-cultural perspective, the artist attaches little significance to the object of representation. For him, the action of painting is more important than the object of painting. Concentrating on the variation of color and form in brushing, Kang looks into the rhythm of difference and repetition in shadow and cloth pattern appearing varied according to the body’s pose and movement. That is the reason why he chose ‘the clothes’ as his theme.

Kang keeps the frame of representation but incessantly crosses the border between real scene and pictoriality. The pictorial space that he creates is not tightly closed; on the contrary, it is frozen at the moment when they look incomplete or not yet finished, so as to leave room for communication with real scene.

Kang’s painting looks plain and light. Apparently somehow unfinished, it radiates a sense of easiness. The somehow relaxing mood is partially due to the artist’s intentional escape from symbolic signification. The object that he describes loses its own characteristic and participates in the painting surface. Given that Kang emphasizes not the represented object but the action of painting, his works could seem to belong to the Modernist abstract painting. However, his pictorial surface, stepping aside from the realistic criteria through its self-sufficient formal aestheticity under the frame of representation, pursues the inner rhythm without desire to be the so-called abstract painting. It is undoubted that Kang’s works always oscillate between real scene and pictorial space.

In this solo show, the audience will meet Kang’s works renewed and deepened on the basis of the last ten-year works. His own productive repetition, through which the unfinished past works are reinterpreted and recreated, impressively suggests the future direction of his works. 
Self portrait
195 x 190 cm
Oil on canvas
2009