The colorful geometric print of a dress, distorted by darting; the body underneath a loose-fitting, plaid button-down obscured in the billowing fabric; a sternly patterned heavy curtain, its pale jade, floral pleated chintz bisected by a pearlescent, plastic drapery chain. Each of these works by the late Korean artist Kang Seok Ho depicts a placid yet relentless present — there is no narrative, no relational reference point, but rather a never-ending now.
Exploring both the varying intensity of illusion as well as the ways in which meanings are placed upon representations, the paintings in Kang’s exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery, exhibited for the first time in the United States, take their time to elicit a deeper commentary on our all-seeing age, an act of slow looking not usually asked of viewers. As our attention becomes rationed into increasingly shrinking parcels, it can be difficult to allow the act of looking itself to become the experience. Kang asks viewers to observe and discover the details within the inner spaces of process and depiction, a request that when fulfilled yields significant dividends.
Kang’s practice defiantly challenges passive looking, questioning not only what it is we want out of our images, but also how and why our representations accrue meaning. All of the works in the exhibition feature fabrics as the main subject, in the form of functional draperies and clothing in often tightly cropped views, without acknowledging the narrative of their unidentified hosts underneath. Kang’s paintings project a sense of photographic seriality — each alluding to an unseen before and after. The imagery is in fact sourced from photographs, a selection of which is presented in a vitrine, with the resulting views masked with tape for a simplified view that shears away the specificity of their references and exposes the anonymous beauty of each composition.
In “Untitled” (2004), a tightly cropped view of a man’s torso perhaps caught mid-stride is presented with a suit jacket unbuttoned and a belt buckle partially obscured by the rippling shirt. Focal points oscillate between the delicate weaving of the fabric and the way it cuts and folds over the body. The man’s hand is indistinct, insinuated. Lacking the full context, viewers are confronted by the anonymity of the scene.
In Kang’s works, vision is lionized as our assumptions for its utility are excavated, the strata examined and reappraised. Ingrained into the texture of these canvases is an open-ended proposition, an attempt to reclaim what is lost in the communicative jitter of contemporaneity, an aspiration to unite the fleeting and the permanent in extraordinary harmony: to look and to see.
