Suki Seokyeong Kang’s solo exhibition “Our Spring” opened at a turning point in the seasons, with cold winds still blustering through avenues in New York even as their bite had started to soften. The air was shifting. It was precisely this spatiotemporal churn—the wild buckling of time—that suffused the show. Trained in traditional ink painting at Seoul’s Ewha Woman’s University and later at London’s Royal College of Art, Kang developed a landscape-centered practice that evolved into a spatial, associative mapping of terrain onto the body. Anti-monumental in scale and intent, her works resist gendered and hierarchical readings of land, aligning the pitch of a mountain with the slope of an elder’s spine. Marking the first anniversary of the artist’s passing at the age of forty-eight, the show memorialized the last decade of her widely ambidextrous, referential practice across two interconnected installations.
The first gallery presented paintings from Kang’s “Jeong—step” series, 2023–24, inspired by Jeongganbo, a fifteenth-century Korean gridded musical-notation system. The works adopted their square measures as a generative backing to push painting into the sculptural register: Dark wooden grids enclosed washes of spring colors and dripped paint on mulberry paper and silk. Threads were stretched across these surfaces, loose ends splaying at the edges—traces of the hand that wove them. Hung at varying heights, the works floated like musical marks, their large scale compelling viewers to crane their necks as one might in order to observe a tree or a cliff.
Nearby, tenderly conceived sculptures from the “Rove and Round” series, 2016–23, recalled household items—hampers, towel caddies, and walkers, variously constructed from painted steel, wood, brass, woven-sedge mats, leather, thread, and wheels. Works such as mat, double belly #18-01, 2017–18, and face #23-03, 2016–23, referenced both Kang’s late grandmother (her soft front, the curve of her aging back) and her own body (the strength of her arms, the length of her torso). Kang’s engagement with post-Minimalist abstraction is economical yet relational: Using opposing materials such as industrial steel and handwoven mats to figure the body, she resolved aesthetic conflicts with whimsy and play, as one might mediate between wily children.
In the next gallery, the installation Mountain–hours, 2020–21, evoked a pastoral scene inspired by the Korean forest where the artist’s studio was located. Suspended from the ceiling like chimes were large aluminum forms, among which viewers circulated like currents of wind. The works’ arches evoked mountains; circular designs suggested planetary bodies or lakes. Their varied surfaces—smooth, brushed, cratered, hammered—read like topographic maps. On the surrounding walls, Kang’s 2022–24 “Warm Round” series of painted-steel, silk, and thread pieces glowed like triplet suns in shades of yellow, white, and blue.
Against one wall, two woven Hwamunseok works—dark-hued sedge mats handmade by Korean craftswomen—hung on steel grids. Within Kang’s cosmology, mats serve as both a resting place and a stage, demarcating where a body stands physically and socially. Within Mountain–hours, the mats appeared as itinerant hikers surveying the scenery. Along the entry wall, the “Mora-nuha” series, 2014–24, consisted of cut and framed acrylic panels that once lined the artist’s studio floor. Named for the mora, a unit smaller than a syllable, the works, with their accumulated drips, dust, and residues of daily ritual, grounded the installation like speckled earth.
Indeed, architectural elements throughout the show became meditations on chagyeong, a Korean principle of “borrowing scenery,” or extending landscape into domestic settings. In design, this might involve using windows, doors, or archways as framing techniques to create living paintings. For Kang, integrating mountains and seasons into everyday life reflected the generative capacity of tradition, as it shapes our construction of the present. Like echoes from the past, poems written and read by Kang underscored the show’s synesthetic charge. From a hanging speaker at one end of the gallery, Kang’s voice intoned verses in Korean while another recording emanating from the far side of the gallery responded with the English translations. (On opening night, diverse collaborators activated Mountain–hours with poetry, performance, and music, reflecting Kang’s interdisciplinary commitments.) Meanwhile, the poem “Willow” (2022) came tumbling through the gallery: “the size of a span.” I pondered. “Far and full like a long journey / Our spring.” The lines unfolded like a riddle or the blossoming of the seasons: It appeared we’d come full circle.
—Sofia Thieu D'Amico
