The Images featuring Kang Seok Ho: Hite Collection

This exhibition is about the image where language has not reached. A curator becomes frustrated when language cannot keep up with the density of the image nor empty out its emptiness. This exhibition was inspired by images which language failed to reach. While an exhibition is already an outcome of the curator and artist’s infinitely repeated processes of imagining and simulating its image, it is only just an illusion that has not become realized until it is rendered in physical space. An exhibition that has finally reached as a real image in a place exists as a temporary moment and scene, and disappears. The exhibition is an image and language which accompanies many images and languages, but it is destined to soon disappear when it becomes an actual subject. When the exhibition vanishes, the language and image that made up the exhibition are left to wander in parts of our imagination, prompting us to form relationships with the exhibition that has disappeared as a subject of consciousness.

Works by Kang Seok Ho are featured in the exhibition. Kang was immersed in phenomenology and once wrote a writing that explained how time flows differently both physically and psychologically depending on the position and environment in which one stands. [1] His moon painting evokes the artist’s sense of curiosity about the eclipse he observed one afternoon. Curious about the change of light created by the earth, moon and sun through the eclipse, and the response of water, leaves and objects to it, Kang explained how experiencing something that is different from the sun light we usually sense will make one remember it as an event. Such memory of objects and events led to his thoughts about time. Kang said, “For a long time, I have been trying to approach the nature of time, questioning what time is, how it is, and what it means to me. Even though I have spent countless days questioning, I can only sense time in the unit of a day. It seems quite meaningless to me to divide the day into 24 hours, an hour into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60 seconds. Rather, I find myself perceiving and remembering moments formed through understanding them as matters that exist in reality and through the relationship between events." [2]

[1] Seokho Kang, “Memories of Matter and Events,” 3 Minutes of Happiness (Paju: Mimesis, 2023), 201.

[2] Ibid, 201.