Kang Seok Ho (1971–2021) developed a singular painterly language grounded in close observation, material sensitivity, and a devotion to the surface of the canvas at a time when Korean contemporary art was increasingly oriented toward conceptual and multimedia practices. Trained in both sculpture and painting, Kang approached the human figure as a site for formal experimentation rather than narrative depiction. While inspired by the Old Masters—admiring Western painters’ treatment of color and light and the East Asian landscape tradition’s emphasis on subject interpretation—his technique remained entirely his own. Working on linen carefully primed to preserve its weave, he applied thinned oil paint in delicate, uniform layers using a distinctive tapping technique, allowing pigment to settle into a textured, luminous surface.

Across his practice, Kang treated bodies as topographical forms: fragments of skin, folds, and shadows transformed through cropping, enlargement, and reframing into quiet, tactile fields that hover between figuration and abstraction. He often worked from photographs—his own or sourced from media—first in the Get Up series, which focused on clothed torsos, backs, and buttocks. Its abstracted details enabled him to explore intimacy and rhythm in ordinary forms—a method he carried into the Couple and Nude series to magnify and transform intimate details.

The Nude series, first introduced around 2012, reinterprets one of painting’s oldest subjects through radical framing and material restraint. Instead of depicting full figures, Kang isolates small sections of the body—décolletage, the curve of the torso, or the navel—distilling the nude to subtle shifts of color, light, and texture. By enlarging these details to the point of near-abstraction, he transforms the surface of skin into a painterly landscape, privileging tactile sensation over anatomical description. Although viewers often interpreted these works as erotic, Kang emphasized instead the formal and perceptual concerns that drove his practice. This is especially evident in his final Nude paintings, created for a 2021 group exhibition at Gallery SoSo shortly before his passing, in which he concentrated on the belly button as a physical and metaphorical center. Enlarged to the point of abstraction, the navel becomes an intimate locus of folds and crevices, suspended within expanses of softly modulated skin. In Korean, the expression “belly-button friends” refers to companions known since birth, and several of these works are believed to depict the navels of his friends—an added layer of tenderness that deepens their sense of closeness and shared origin. These compositions, among the most intimate of Kang’s career, distill the body into its most elemental forms, revealing his sustained fascination with the boundaries between exposure and restraint, representation and perception.