Gangnam, Seoul
Honggoo Kang
Cloud, Sea, Island
One and JOne and J Gallery is pleased to present Honggoo Kang's solo exhibition, Cloud, Sea, Island. In the early 1990s, Kang began creating manipulated digital images that capture the real-life scenery of Korean society. Since the 2000s, he has used digital photography and painting to record the changing face of the city under capitalism, such as towns that have been razed by redevelopment, as well as the realities of the people who live there. Kang, who belongs to the first generation of digital photographers in Korea, has used digital image manipulation techniques such as photo collage and photo montage, as well as photographs of objects and a technique of paintings on top of photographs, to harness both the documentary quality of the photograph and the unreality of digital photography. Ultimately, these efforts have enabled him to create images that traverse the boundary between the real and the fake, using metaphor to express the complex, contradictory reality of Korean society. In his previous work, Kang focused on the contradictions and great powers at work in modern society. Since 2022, however, his hometown has been the primary focus of his work. Shinan County, where he was born and raised, was once a familiar place where he was an insider. However, when he returned in 2005, twenty years after first leaving for Seoul in his late twenties, Shinan felt unfamiliar, as if he was seeing it through the eyes of an outsider. For the past seventeen years—that is, since 2005, when he first encountered this “familiar unfamiliarity”—he has documented a great number of islands and ocean views. In this work, he interrogates the “gap” existing between the familiarity of his memories and the unfamiliarity of his lived reality. In 2022, One and J Gallery held a solo exhibition of Kang’s work titled The Sea of Shinan — Mud, Sand and Wind, providing a comprehensive introduction to his hometown of Shinan. Subsequently, in 2023, the exhibition Uninhabited Island & Inhabited Island — The Sea of Shinan II, held by Savina Museum, presented works that capture the lives of individuals living on inhabited islands, as well as his own fantastical memories that he dreamed up while gazing at uninhabited islands as a young boy. This exhibition Cloud, Sea, Island, is the first to present Kang’s paintings that depict the clouds and seas that he experienced in Shinan. The exhibition also introduces works featuring whimsical and offbeat drawings of laundry, pencils, canvases, torches, and more painted on photographs of uninhabited islands. Kang explained his decision to begin creating paintings of clouds and seas by stating that the works are “paintings that a boy who was born on an island and grew up with the ocean could not help but paint before growing any older.” As the title of the exhibition implies, the scenery of Shinan—which has fundamentally shaped Kang’s past, present, and future—has penetrated deep within him, creating something that continues to move his body and mind. For Cloud, Sea, Island, Kang has extracted some of this “something” to put on display for viewers. In his new paintings that depict the oceans and seas of Shinan, such as April Sea (2024), Evening Sea 1–4 (2024), Deep Sea (2024), and Overcast Sea 1-3 (2024), Kang expresses the various appearances, colors, and temperatures of the ocean according to the seasons and weather by reducing them to their simplest abstractions. The ever-changing nimbus, cumulus, and cumulonimbus clouds that form as the air meets the water over the ocean are expressed in clear, distinct forms. However, in order to give the paintings an overall natural feel, he has allowed the paint to repeatedly bleed, mix, and run on the fabric surface, causing the pigments to blend and meld. It was not an easy task to draw the seemingly endless ocean views that he experienced during his childhood and their ever-changing forms on the canvas and convey them to viewers. By positioning his paintings between the abstract and the figurative, he hopes that they appear “as if they had drawn themselves.” However, despite his wishes, these paintings did not draw themselves; instead, they are the accumulation of the repeated process of erasing and repainting, ultimately resulting in a painting. Uninhabited Island (2022–), a series that sits like an uninhabited island between paintings of seas and clouds, features acrylic paintings made on top of digital photographs, an approach that came to Kang naturally while he was looking at photos that he had taken in Shinan. This series of over 30 works captures the fantastical memories that came to his mind while staring at uninhabited islands as a child, as well as the facts he learned and the things he experienced after becoming an adult. Honggoo Kang (b. 1956, Korea) studied in Mokpo Teacher’s College in Korea and received his B.F.A and M.F.A of fine arts in Hongik University in Korea. He has held solo and dual exhibitions at Art Archives, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2024); Savina Museum, Seoul (2023); Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2022); Wumin Art Center, Seoul (2016); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art-MMCA, Seoul (2015); Goeun Museum of Photography, Seoul (2013) and others. Selected group exhibitions featuring his artwork at Daegu Museum of Art, Daegu (2024); Jeonnam Museum of Art, Jeonnam (2023); MMCA, Seoul (2019, 2018); MMCA, Gwacheon (2018) and many more. Work by the artist is held in museum collections, including National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; MMCA, Art Bank, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art, Korea; Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Korea; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours, France and others.