Hold Still

Tina Kim is pleased to present Kang Seok Ho: Hold Still. This marks the gallery’s second solo exhibition dedicated to the late Korean artist following his debut presentation in 2023. Bringing together works from his Couple and Nude series, created between the mid-2010s and 2021, the exhibition traces Kang’s sustained exploration of the human figure as a site for investigating painterly surface, materiality, and form. Though the works depict overlapping faces, entwined figures, and tightly cropped nudes, they reveal that Kang’s true subject was not the figure itself but the act of painting—and how the effort to see and depict another reflects the paradox of closeness and distance inherent in human relationships. Kang Seok Ho (1971–2021) studied sculpture at Seoul National University before training under Jan Dibbets at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he received his MFA in 2001 before returning to Seoul. Devoted to the medium of painting at a moment when Korean art discourse was centered on multimedia and conceptual practices, Kang developed a singular method of tapping a brush dipped in thinned paint to build up delicate, uniform layers, creating textured surfaces where pigment both reveals and mimics the weave of the linen beneath. Kang’s approach was informed by the philosophy of East Asian landscape painting—which privileges the subjective interpretation of nature over direct representation. In his Couple and Nude paintings, the body becomes a kind of landscape: a terrain for exploring gesture, surface, and dimensionality in paint. The exhibition title, Hold Still, alludes to Kang’s meticulous process of selecting and reframing images to fit the proportions of his canvases, translating fleeting moments from contemporary life into the measured temporality of painting.