Registering movement or awaiting activation, paintings and sculptures from Suki Seokyeong Kang’s last decade – before her untimely death from cancer, aged 47, last year – are gathered in ‘Our Spring’, an exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery in New York. Much of the first gallery is given over to the Korean artist’s ‘Jeong’ paintings (2014–24), made of silk stretched on partially exposed wooden frames. Kang related the series to the Korean Jeongganbo system for noting pitch and rhythm in a grid. Read as musical notation, these works can become turbulent arrangements despite their restrained construction. Take Jeong 210 × 163 #04 (2021–22), in which blotchy splashes and aggressive strokes, a mix of ink and gouache, overwhelm the top three-quarters of the work; it suggests a window shade about to fly up sans touch, its internal spring mechanism wound too tight. A later work from the same series, the four-quadrant Jeong #07 (2023–24), is relatively serene. Juxtaposed with an exposed frame at top right, three quadrants of painted silk suggest light passing through coloured glass.
The paintings’ play with thresholds and domestic forms is echoed in the nearby Rove and Round – mat, double belly #18-01 (2017–18). Evoking a lived-in interior and the rituals that accompany domestic life, the free-standing sculpture features a metal ladder-like structure topped with a woven textile, calling to mind a damp mat hung by an open window to dry. Kang’s work has frequently invited comparison with traditional Korean arts and crafts – ink painting, dance and weaving – as well as to the meditative minimalism of Lee Ufan, Park Seo-Bo and Agnes Martin. But here, it’s also clear how it operates in proximity to furniture and architecture, even recalling the wearable cloth works of Hélio Oiticica and Haegue Yang’s use of venetian blinds.
The second gallery houses works from Kang’s ‘Mora – Nuha’ series (2014–24), which hang in silver-leaf frames. To create them, the artist set clear acrylic panels around her studio in Seoul’s Nuha neighbourhood. Over time, the panels accumulated small splatters, crusted blobs of colour and the ghostly traces of paint cans. (Dust, though imperceptible, is also a listed material.) The resulting surfaces embrace accident and residue, elevating drips and stray marks to a kind of notation. They record life in the studio, and they humble art practice – making the crux of the matter not the artist’s most refined work, but what was on the floor after the fact. The word ‘mora’ in the series title refers to small sonic units, implying that a full soundtrack could accompany each panel. Viewers are invited to imagine the quick, light notes that might chime with the snowy splatters of paint.
Back in the second gallery, nine aluminium arcs and ovals comprise Kang’s ‘Mountain – hours’ series (2020–21). Mountain – hours #21-07 (2020–21), a mobile dangling from a wire, evokes a cartoonish outline of a head and an upper torso. Ready to turn at the slightest current of air, it resonates with Kang’s interest in variable encounters. Another mobile, Mountain – hours #21-03 (2020–21), approximates a loom with weaving suspended in progress. Audio recordings of Korean poems and songs play nearby, activating Kang’s sculptural gestures by inserting related narratives: descriptions of a nest the size of two cupped hands, for example, or a grandmother sewing. The poems make explicit that the Mountain sculptures operate as scores: open-ended and forever available for activation, reflecting the artist’s desire for her work to possess stored energy, the potential to be stretched and transformed. These are works to continue living with. They reveal an artist attuned to chance and fleeting moments, who crafted deliberate compositions that feel resoundingly flexible and profoundly permeable.
—Marcus Civin
