For the late Korean artist Suki Seokyeong Kang (1977–2025), art was a method of measuring how the individual inhabits the world. Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, video, and choreography, Kang's research-driven practice drew on a distinctly Korean artistic genealogy — from the Jeongganbo, a fifteenth-century grid-system of musical notation; to the hwamunseok, a reed mat used in Chunaengmu, a traditional one-person court dance; to jinkyeong sansuhwa, or "True-View" landscape painting. Across these references, Kang returned again and again to the Korean concept of jari — denoting "place," "seat," or "territory" — to explore the space afforded to the individual within society.

Kang’s Mat series is where this exploration finds its most direct expression. Taking hwamunseok, a reed mat historically used to demarcate the dance floor for a single performer in Chunaengmu, Kang re-conceptualizes the object through the Korean word jari, which means "mat" as well as "place" or "seat," turning it into a tool for expanding the possibilities of the painting medium. To produce the mats, the artist collaborated with female craftswomen from Ganghwado, an island in the Yellow Sea bordering North Korea, who carry on a centuries-old weaving tradition using locally sourced white reeds. Kang intentionally chose materials from this geographic meeting point between differing ideologies, binding them together into a rich visual score. The mats are presented in varied and sometimes unexpected ways: hung on the wall like paintings, suspended in the air, folded or rolled into bundles, framed in steel, or even draped over other works like skin. In recent iterations, Kang overlaps hand-woven hwamunseok with metal grid frames to create layered compositions that function as translucent screens. By separating and revealing space, Kang captured the shifting landscape anew with each change of light, shadow, and movement.