Suki Seokyeong Kang: Willow Drum Oriole: Leeum Museum of Art

Suki Seokyeong Kang: Willow Drum Oriole

September 7 - December 31, 2023

Leeum Museum of Art

In Partnership with BOTTEGA VENETA

Experimenting with the expansive possibilities of painting as a medium through a variety of media and methods, including two dimensional work, sculpture, installation, video, and performance (“activations”), Suki Seokyeong Kang's oeuvre encompasses a wide range of artistic, cultural, and social contexts that are at once traditional and contemporary. This exhibition, the largest institutional solo show of the artist to date, presents works that have been developed from previous series such as Jeong, Mora, Mat, and Grandmother Tower as well as Mountain, Ears, Hours, Column, and Floor, a new body of diversified work, including sculptural installations and a video.

Willow Drum Oriole, the title of both the exhibition and a new video work, is a reference to the sages of yore who would read the movements and sounds of the oriole flying in and out of the leaves of willow trees, as if weaving a thread into the fabric of the landscape. Using this metaphor, the artist symbolically reveals a defining characteristic of her work: sensitivity to audiovisual and tactile awareness, combined with spatiotemporal experience. The exhibition unfurls like a landscape painting, spread across and resounding synesthetically through a three dimensional space; in it are mountains reifying the four seasons of the year, day and night stretched over the floor and walls, ears wide open and hovering in the air, narrow yet rich meadows and rounded figures roving around only to linger in place, and various rectangular frames creating spaces for each work, while invisibly delineating the composition of the exhibition. The structures created therein exude rich reverberations arising from between the frames and margins, warmth and coolness, softness and hardness, stillness and movement.

Suki Seokyeong Kang contemplates the territory that society grants to the individual and envisions a "true-view" landscape in which the presence and movement of those around us are perceived and interrelated. Although the works of the landscape each exist in different forms and ways, they collectively unravel a narrative of togetherness as they organically integrate and disperse. The artist thereby presents an arena in which I, you, and we exist wholesomely, persistently mediating our imbalances and differences.