Despite being categorically aligned with figurative painting, Kang Seok Ho's work did not leave much room for narrative. His method of tapping the brush in thin paint and building up layers strives toward abstraction, the act of making and thinking becoming a singular act. Beyond his artistic practice, he was a furniture collector, writer, and curator, where his curatorial practice often questioned if a Korean aesthetic exists in painting by Korean artists. He often used his own writing as introductory text for his own solo and curated exhibitions. Not separating his daily life and art, he led meetings to interact with fellow artists on the subjects of painting, books, music, hiking, and fishing. Kang's first retrospective, “seok ho kang: 3 Minutes of Happiness” (2022-2023) was held at the Seoul Museum of Art in the first year after his untimely death.

Get Up Series
“Get Up” series was initially prompted by a drawing Kang did in 1999 of his friend’s sweater while sitting across from each other at a cafe, these works are based on photos Kang took, then cut, re-angled, and enlarged on the canvas. Kang excluded narrative features such as a person’s face and the surrounding background, and focused rather on formal details such as color, pattern, texture, and wrinkles of fabric as they move along the curves of the body, creating a unique visual language. The technique that Kang used was to mix the paint thinly in a large bucket of water, and use the brush to either tap or brush the paint onto the canvas surface. In this way, Kang created a painting like a landscape by removing the narrative from an everyday scene. Paintings from this series approximate landscape paintings, rather than figure paintings, in that all characteristics of a person are eliminated. Kang mentioned that he depicted one's posterior in white pants or jeans, thinking about Korean white porcelain or a rocky landscape. A common everyday scene accessible to us is reorganized through his unique point of view and is transferred to the world of paintings reflecting his imagination, mental images, and formative sense. An important series for the artist, "Get up" was a body of work that was initiated in 1999 and he continued working on it up until right before he passed away in 2021.