Ik-Joong Kang
Review
November 19, 2005 'Hope & Dream' Ali center
By Ik-Joong Kang
Education is crucial part of center's goal
By Matt Batcheldor
Inspired by the Champ A visit to the new Muhammad Ali Center
By Gordon Marino
The Vision of Community in a World of Books
The Greatest: Muhammad Ali Center: A showcase for global ideals
by Dave Hoekstra
Angelo, August/December 2004 Buddha with Lucky Objects Ik-Joong Kang
By Karen Gahafer
Press Release, 2004 Happy World at Princeton Public Library
Would you like to build a wall of peace?
by Nancy Russell
Princeton Public Library mural will be multlingual
By Jennifer Potash
Princeton packet, Friday, march 12, 2004 Portrait of the artist
By Jillian Kalonick
Town Topics, Feb. 4, 2004 Library Artist Seeks World Language Student
Editorial department
Princeton Packet, Feb.3, 2004 Library Mural will be Multilingual
By Editorial Department
Town topics, January 14, 2004
Community Invited to Help Create Art for New Library
by Susan Thomas
The Trenton Times, Jan. 18, 2004 Artwork by donation
Bits, pieces arrive for library mural
By Chris Karmoil
Princeton Packet, Jan.13 2004
Artist invites public to donate artifacts for library's new mural
By Jennifer Potash
The Princeton Packet, December 12, 2003 Library Mural to Tell Princeton's Story
By Jennifer Potash
Brooklyn Heights Press & Cobble Hill News, November 27, 2003
'Buddha' Artist Explains His 'Diaries' and 'Notes'
By Abby Ranger
Exhibition Catalogue, 2003 Ik-Joong Kang at Sabina Lee Gallery, LA, CA
By James Glass
Sculpture Magazine, Sep. 2002 ik-joong kang in the United Nations
By Jonathan Peyser
Exhibition Catalog, 2002 Ik-Joong Kang : Cologne Pagoda & other works
Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
by Jaana Pruess
Exhibition catalog, 2002 Cologne Pagoda and Other Works at National
Museum of Asian Art in Berlin
By Uta Rahman-Steinert (Curator)
Exhibition Catalog BRIDGES - INTERSPACES - SKY Pruess & Ochs Gallery
By Jaana Pruess
United Nations Secretariat news (November - December 2001)
"Amazed World"
By Val Castronovo
Amazed World Exhibition catalog, 2001 Amazed World
By Soon-Young Yoon
Press Release, 2001 The Amazed World
By Ik-Joong Kang
The Virginian Pilot -The Daily Break, January 27, 2000
Sweet Salute
By Teresa Annas (Staff Writer)
Neueus aus Sammlung Ludwig, Exhibition Catalogue 1999
The Art of Ik-Joong Kang
by Eugenie Tsai,
(Senior Curator, Permanent Collection Whitney Museum of American Art)
Art Asia Pacific, Number 19, 1998 LIVING ON THE EDGE
Borders and cultures in the work of Ik-Joong Kang
By Joan Kee
The Virginian Pilot The Daily Break, Saturday, December 13, 1997
Worldly Visions
By Teresa Annas
ART NEWS, March 1997 In the Palm of His Hand
By Carol Lutfy
Exhibition Catalogue, 1997 Venice Biennale
By Kwang-su Oh (Commissioner of Korean Pavilion)
The Earth Time, November 16-30, 1996 Let them eat chocolate
by Soon Young Yoon
The New York Times, Wednesday, July 31, 1996 '8,490 Days of Memory'
Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris
By Grace Glueck
The Village Voice, July 30 1996 Art Short List : Ik-Joong Kang
By Kim Levin
Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris July 12-September 27
1996 8490 Days Of Memory
by Eugenie Tsai
Art Net Magazine, July 1996 8,490 Days of Memory
The Whitney Museum at Philip Morris
by Joan Kee
Reviews, June 27, 1996 365 Days of English.
Assemblages by Ik-Joong Kang at the Contemporary Arts Forum.
By Marina Walker
The Independent, June 27, 1996 Art Assimilations
By Marina Walker
Korea Times, March 30, 1996
Rising young artist gathers and mixes images of America
By Cho Yoon-jung
Exhibition Catalog, 1996 Life as a Huge Mosaic
By Yi, Joo-Heon (Director of Art Space Seoul)
A.MAGAZINE, 1996 Home Sweet Hamage
By Kay Kamiyama
The New York Times,
Sunday, September 18, 1994
From Korea, the Makings of a Dialogue With a New Homeland
By Vivien Raynor
The advocate and Greenwich Time,
Whitney’s art "happening"
Space Magazine(Korea),
Sunday, August 21, 1994
By Carolee Ross
1994
Multiple / Dialogue: Paik, Nam-June and Kang, Ik-Joong
(Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, 7. 22 - 9.28, 1994)
By Jeong Lee Sanders
San Francisco Examiner, Wednesday, Feburary 2, 1994
Remarkable Opening for Capp Street
San Francisco Chronicle,
By David Bonetti
Jan 26, 1994 ‘Future Is Now at Capp Street’
By Kenneth Baker
Art New England, 1994 December / January 1995 Multiple Dialogue
collaboration with Nam June Paik
by Michael Rush
New York Newsday, February 4, 1992
An Installation of 7,000 Ik-Joong Kang Works Tiny Windows on the World
By Esther Iverem
Godzilla, 1992 Ik-Joong Kang
By Eugenie Tsai
The New York Times, Sunday, March 17, 1991
2 Artists View the World in Statements With 3,142 Images
By Helen A. Harrison
The Village Voice, December 11, 1990
Throw Everything Together and Add
By Arlene Raven
Sunday Star-Ledger, December 9, 1990
Exhibit features thousands of pocket-sized paintings
By Eileen Watkins
ARTSPIRAL, 1991-WINTER Sound Paintings
Montclair State College Art Gallery November 2-December 19, 1990
By Byron Kim
ARTimes, November 1990
Ik-Joong Kang
By Marion Budick
November 19, 2005
THope & Dream, Ali center
By Ik-Joong Kang
It is a great honor to be a part of a dream factory, The Muhammad Ali Center. My name
is ik-joong kang. I am a painter and a collector. I collect dreams, dreams of the children.
For the last 7 years, I’ve collected over 125,000 children’s drawings from 141 countries. I
asked children their dreams and children answered back with a 3"x3" paper filled with their
stories. The first drawing I received was from a child in Cuba, with a surprising image of
Palestinian and Israeli children hugging each other. Children facing severe hardships,
including orphans in Mexico, refugees in Azerbaijan and children with Aids in Uganda
participated. More than 300 drawings came from Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. A 12
years old Uzbekistan girl says, “I have six sisters but I want brother", in her drawing of
herself pushing a little brother in a stroller. A boy from Congo made a beautiful drawing
with an inscription, " the way to survive in Africa - never see, never talk and never hear". A
young Switzerland child designed a house walking with robot legs. A 10-year-old Italian
boy is making a wonderful over- head kick in World Cup soccer game. In 1999 we
created “100,000 Dreams”. Thousands of drawings were displayed inside a one-kilometer
long greenhouse near the DMZ, borderline between North and South Korea. It was lit up at
night, as if to invite North Korean children on the other side to come out and play. We
followed this project with “Amazed World 2001,” an installation composed of 34,000
children’s drawings from all over the world, at the headquarters of the United Nations in
New York. The project was supposed to be open on Sept. 11, 2001. The dreams of the
children were waiting to be heard and seen in uptown New York, while the tragedy struck
in downtown Manhattan. Drawings are from the mountains in Tibet, street corners in Hong
Kong and from the war zone in Iraq. Amazed World is like a building a big house, house
with a big roof and big wall, but with many small windows. Windows of the dream.
Children come into the big room and say hello to each other and hug each other, and all
their windows of dream placed next to each other for us to see. Now we plan to collect
millions or billions of children’s dreams, which, I believe, can connect the villages,
countries and the entire world. One drawing says, “A wall of dream can break down the
wall of hatred and ignorance that separated us for a long time.” Children’s drawing has a
magical power. Through their drawings, a divider becomes a connector, a winter becomes
a spring. A night becomes a morning. And the enemy becomes the friends. “What is your
dream?” When I asked. A child answered back. “Hey, Mr.kang, what was your dream and
what is your dream now?” We have to answer. Now. Before it’s too late. Thank you.
Courier-Journal, Nov. 19,2005
Education is crucial part of center's goals
Lessons have global reach
By Matt Batcheldor
Artist Ik-Joong Kang calls them a window to children worldwide -- 5,000 drawings from
141 countries decorating a 44-foot mural in the Muhammad Ali Center.
Kang spent a week affixing the 3-inch-by-3-inch wood blocks that reproduce children's
drawings. Kang solicited the images by contacting schools, orphanages and hospitals
around the globe.
The mural includes 500 drawings from Kentucky children collected by the state
Department for Libraries and Archives.
The images depict each child's dream. One captures a rainbow. Another shows children
holding hands and dancing.
"If we come close to our dream, our window, we can see many things," Kang said.
The importance of children to the Ali Center is reflected on that wall, and it goes to the
heart of the center's purpose, its president, Michael Fox, said.
"Foremost, this center is about the development of children," he said.
The center is developing lessons for children from preschool to high school that can be
used inside and outside the center.
It also is building technology that will allow educational broadcasts to be beamed around
the world and translated into other languages. A host of games and activities are also
maintained at the center's Web site: alicenter.org.
The center's efforts have attracted high-profile attention from the United Nations and
such celebrities as Angelina Jolie, who donated $100,000, center spokeswoman Jeanie
Kahnke said.
The center also is partnering with the United Nations' Global Peace Schools program,
helping to develop curriculum. The program, with schools in 17 countries and 20 states, is
designed to convey the horrors of armed conflict around the world and the value of peace.
Closer to home, Jefferson County Public Schools is incorporating the center's curriculum,
said Superintendent Stephen Daeschner, who is on the center's board of directors. For
example, public schools train groups of children to mediate disputes among peers.
"I'm convinced that as we develop this thing it will be a super asset for our kids,"
Daeschner said. Leading the center's educational arm is educational services manager
Michele Hemenway, with help from a youth council comprising 20 area children
representing public, private and home schools. The center has an educational staff of
three and a dedicated budget.
The curriculum Hemenway is developing will include global studies, citizenship,
peacemaking and personal well-being.
Educational programming will follow the six traits emphasized by the center -- respect,
confidence, conviction, dedication, spirituality and giving. For example, the center is
enlisting a group of community figures such as storytellers or musicians who could visit
schools and give dramatic presentations on the trait "respect."
Other work with children also predates the center's opening. In summer 2003, the center
provided source material for 13 high school students who were charged with writing a
libretto and score for an operetta based on Ali's life. The work, "Muhammad Ali: Outside
the Ring," sponsored by the Kentucky Opera, was finished last year.
Not only is the Ali Center a place to mediate global conflicts, but the center also will train
people to end conflicts in the home, Fox said.
It all starts with children.
"If we had not the interest and commitment … to really help children realize their hopes
and dreams, there would be no reason for the center," Fox said.
The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2005
Inspired by the Champ
A visit to the new Muhammad Ali Center.
BY GORDON MARINO
LOUISVILLE, Ky.--Physically broken from his many years in the ring, Muhammad Ali could
easily be regarded as a walking--or, rather, shuffling--argument against professional
pugilism. Nevertheless, it was through boxing that the silver-tongued sweet scientist was
able to reach beyond the ropes and inspire people around the globe. Over the past
decade, many individuals have come together in an attempt to institutionalize the boxer's
unique spirit in the form of a Muhammad Ali Center.
On the eve of the center's inaugural event, which brought Bill Clinton and many other
luminaries to this river town, Mr. Ali's wife, Lonnie, told me: "Back in the mid-'90s, a
distant relative put on an Ali boxing memorabilia show in Louisville. It was a great success.
Afterward, we were approached by entrepreneurs who wanted to build a museum."
Because of her husband's ailments, Mrs. Ali does virtually all of the talking for the man
once known as the Louisville Lip. She explained: "Muhammad was not interested in
something that put the spotlight on his boxing accomplishments and on the past. Instead,
he wanted it to be a living gift that reached out to people and especially children,
encouraging them to be respectful of one another and to develop self-confidence and
self-discipline--qualities that enabled Muhammad to realize his dreams."
Jerry Abramson, mayor of Louisville, told me that the city donated the land for the building.
He also proudly noted that 40% of the $80 million raised for the project came from
individuals and corporations in Mr. Ali's home state of Kentucky. The CEO of the center,
Michael Fox, added that there is a continuing campaign to raise $20 million more to
establish an endowment to cover the operating costs. Though much work remains to be
done, the 93,000-square-foot center opened to the public on Nov. 21.
In addition to being a repository for important boxing artifacts, the center, in conjunction
with the University of Louisville, will host international programs aimed at promoting peace
and justice. Ina Brown Bond, chairwoman of its board, observed: "There are many
governments that are suspicious of the United States but not of Muhammad Ali, and that
gives us hope that the center could perform a special function in mitigating international
conflicts."
One of the chief architects, Lee Skolnick, struggled with the task of designing a building
that captured the characteristics of the man who inspired it. Viewed from the exterior, the
center is thick and massive at the base. But as the eye moves up the structure, it
becomes lighter and more airy. Mr. Skolnick observed: "Our understanding of Ali is
intertwined with the emergence of mass media in the early '60s and '70s. Most people
came to know Ali through media images and sound bites, and I wanted to convey that
fact in the architecture. For example, the roof is in the shape of butterfly wings, echoing
that famous Ali adage, 'float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.' And the exterior is
embedded with colored ceramic-tile representations of well-known press images of the
champ."
Mr. Skolnick and the chief curator, Susan Shaffer Nahmias, also envisioned a space that
was as warm, generous and playful as Mr. Ali. A visit to the museum begins in the
amphitheater with a powerful video about his life that is strung together with lines from
Rudyard Kipling's poem "If." From there, one moves on to two floors of interactive exhibits
that seek to show Mr. Ali's development from a boxer into a humanitarian. The sheer
preponderance of moralizing messages can be grating. And one visitor complained that
as generous an individual as Mr. Ali is, the center should be generous enough to include a
small display honoring another less-self-promoting boxing champion who also broke
down racial barriers, Joe Louis.
As an athlete, Mr. Ali had the magical ability to attract interest in his bouts from those who
were not ordinarily boxing fans. However, a fascination with boxing will certainly enhance
a visitor's experience of the center. Though there are many exhibits that would fit well in a
civil-rights museum and others that explore the debate over the Vietnam War, the boxingrelated presentations (such as the robe that Elvis Presley gave Mr. Ali) pack the real punch.
Many are just plain fun. There is a mock-up of Mr. Ali's Deer Lake training facilities in
which visitors can learn to hit a speed bag, and there is a strange contraption that
conveys an impression of the force of a heavyweight punch.
After a virtual journey through the boxer's life and times, which does not eschew
discussions of some of the icon's moral blemishes, such as Mr. Ali's womanizing and his
ruthless behavior toward Joe Frazier, patrons follow a spiral staircase into a hall that is
intended to lead them back into themselves. In a room lined with Ik-Joong Kang's
poignant mosaic composed of tiles decorated by children from 141 countries, there is a
bank of computers that beckon the visitors to fill out personality questionnaires and
articulate their life goals. They are then invited to link up with an online coach who will
help them fulfill their aspirations.
There were recordings of Mr. Ali's fights reverberating as I strolled around the exhibits with
Angelo Dundee, Mr. Ali's legendary trainer. As we rounded a corner, the 84-year-old Mr.
Dundee glimpsed a huge photo of Cassius Clay--as Mr. Ali was known back then--with
his mouth taped shut. Mr. Dundee chuckled and burst out, "Hey, I did that. I put the tape
on his mouth." Mr. Ali was, of course, famous for his braggadocio and predictions, and
Mr. Dundee, who knew a little about fanning interest in a fight, used the tape as a photo
prop. Later Mr. Dundee wistfully added: "Being with Ali was like riding a comet. I was
blessed to share in his life. This center is a fantastic monument to a man who deserves it
because he has been so good for the whole human race."
Mr. Marino writes on boxing for The Wall Street Journal.
Town Topics, Princeton / Dec 5, 2005
The Vision of Community in a World of Books
Stuart Mitchner
Say it's an early autumn afternoon in 1985 and you do a Rip Van Winkle, falling asleep
under a tree in the Kingston cemetery to wake up 20 years later thinking only a day has
passed. Walking into Princeton you can tell things are not quite the same, and as Rt. 27
becomes Nassau Street you notice plenty of changes, enough to suggest that your nap
lasted way more than a day, but nothing to make you drop your jaw. Some places are
gone, some have changed names, and yet everything feels the same, maybe because it's
getting dark and fall is in the air. A glance toward the campus brings no major surprises.
Nassau Hall is gently alight and looking as subtle, dignified, and beautiful as it did in 1985.
Figuring that the Princeton Public Library is the most likely place to find out what's been
going on in the world since he fell asleep, old Rip turns right and heads down
Witherspoon.
Here's where his jaw drops.
What happened to the library? What's that four-story torch lighting up the sky across the
street from where Griggs Corner Amoco used to be?
Maybe you, too, have experienced a few Rip Van Winkle moments driving or walking past
the new library since it opened. You can almost take it for granted in the daytime, but
when all its lights are blazing it's still an amazement.
The old library was no slouch architecturally, after all, but at night it looked muted and
modest. It didn't comInspired by the Champ
A visit to the new Muhammad Ali Center.
BY GORDON MARINO
Thursday, December 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
LOUISVILLE, Ky.--Physically broken from his many years in the ring, Muhammad Ali could
easily be regarded as a walking--or, rather, shuffling--argument against professional
pugilism. Nevertheless, it was through boxing that the silver-tongued sweet scientist was
able to reach beyond the ropes and inspire people around the globe. Over the past
decade, many individuals have come together in an attempt to institutionalize the boxer's
unique spirit in the form of a Muhammad Ali Center.
On the eve of the center's inaugural event, which brought Bill Clinton and many other
luminaries to this river town, Mr. Ali's wife, Lonnie, told me: "Back in the mid-'90s, a
distant relative put on an Ali boxing memorabilia show in Louisville. It was a great success.
Afterward, we were approached by entrepreneurs who wanted to build a museum."
Because of her husband's ailments, Mrs. Ali does virtually all of the talking for the man
once known as the Louisville Lip. She explained: "Muhammad was not interested in
something that put the spotlight on his boxing accomplishments and on the past. Instead,
he wanted it to be a living gift that reached out to people and especially children,
encouraging them to be respectful of one another and to develop self-confidence and
self-discipline--qualities that enabled Muhammad to realize his dreams."
Jerry Abramson, mayor of Louisville, told me that the city donated the land for the building.
He also proudly noted that 40% of the $80 million raised for the project came from
individuals and corporations in Mr. Ali's home state of Kentucky. The CEO of the center,
Michael Fox, added that there is a continuing campaign to raise $20 million more to
establish an endowment to cover the operating costs. Though much work remains to be
done, the 93,000-square-foot center opened to the public on Nov. 21.
In addition to being a repository for important boxing artifacts, the center, in conjunction
with the University of Louisville, will host international programs aimed at promoting peace
and justice. Ina Brown Bond, chairwoman of its board, observed: "There are many
governments that are suspicious of the United States but not of Muhammad Ali, and that
gives us hope that the center could perform a special function in mitigating international
conflicts."
One of the chief architects, Lee Skolnick, struggled with the task of designing a building
that captured the characteristics of the man who inspired it. Viewed from the exterior, the
center is thick and massive at the base. But as the eye moves up the structure, it
becomes lighter and more airy. Mr. Skolnick observed: "Our understanding of Ali is
intertwined with the emergence of mass media in the early '60s and '70s. Most people
came to know Ali through media images and sound bites, and I wanted to convey that
fact in the architecture. For example, the roof is in the shape of butterfly wings, echoing
that famous Ali adage, 'float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.' And the exterior is
embedded with colored ceramic-tile representations of well-known press images of the
champ."
Mr. Skolnick and the chief curator, Susan Shaffer Nahmias, also envisioned a space that
was as warm, generous and playful as Mr. Ali. A visit to the museum begins in the
amphitheater with a powerful video about his life that is strung together with lines from
Rudyard Kipling's poem "If." From there, one moves on to two floors of interactive exhibits
that seek to show Mr. Ali's development from a boxer into a humanitarian. The sheer
preponderance of moralizing messages can be grating. And one visitor complained that
as generous an individual as Mr. Ali is, the center should be generous enough to include a
small display honoring another less-self-promoting boxing champion who also broke
down racial barriers, Joe Louis.
As an athlete, Mr. Ali had the magical ability to attract interest in his bouts from those who
were not ordinarily boxing fans. However, a fascination with boxing will certainly enhance
a visitor's experience of the center. Though there are many exhibits that would fit well in a
civil-rights museum and others that explore the debate over the Vietnam War, the boxingrelated presentations (such as the robe that Elvis Presley gave Mr. Ali) pack the real punch.
Many are just plain fun. There is a mock-up of Mr. Ali's Deer Lake training facilities in
which visitors can learn to hit a speed bag, and there is a strange contraption that
conveys an impression of the force of a heavyweight punch.
After a virtual journey through the boxer's life and times, which does not eschew
discussions of some of the icon's moral blemishes, such as Mr. Ali's womanizing and his
ruthless behavior toward Joe Frazier, patrons follow a spiral staircase into a hall that is
intended to lead them back into themselves. In a room lined with Ik-Joong Kang's
poignant mosaic composed of tiles decorated by children from 141 countries, there is a
bank of computers that beckon the visitors to fill out personality questionnaires and
articulate their life goals. They are then invited to link up with an online coach who will
help them fulfill their aspirations.
There were recordings of Mr. Ali's fights reverberating as I strolled around the exhibits
with Angelo Dundee, Mr. Ali's legendary trainer. As we rounded a corner, the 84-year-old
Mr. Dundee glimpsed a huge photo of Cassius Clay--as Mr. Ali was known back then-with his mouth taped shut. Mr. Dundee chuckled and burst out, "Hey, I did that. I put the
tape on his mouth." Mr. Ali was, of course, famous for his braggadocio and predictions,
and Mr. Dundee, who knew a little about fanning interest in a fight, used the tape as a
photo prop. Later Mr. Dundee wistfully added: "Being with Ali was like riding a comet. I
was blessed to share in his life. This center is a fantastic monument to a man who
deserves it because he has been so good for the whole human race."
Mr. Marino writes on boxing for The Wall Street Journal.
e at you with palatial pillars; it didn't glitter and gleam like a diamond as big as the Ritz;
nor did it create the illusion of candlelit shelves ranged within the brilliance, a touch of
medieval library mystery housed in a resplendently contemporary display case. When you
pass through the tall doors you know how it used to feel to walk into great public spaces
back in the days when railway terminals, movie theaters, and libraries were built on the
grand scale.
Inside you can find cozy lounges, classy carpeting, fireplaces, statues, a shop, a cafe, a
big community room for readings and performances and the upcoming Friends of the
Library Book Sale. Art graces every floor. Art, however, can seem at a disadvantage when
it's displayed in a place where people are reading, browsing, studying, or surfing the web.
The photographs of Ricardo Barros can be seen on the second floor through October 30,
but how many busy people using the high-tech equipment will take time to ponder the
negative print of a man in profile you may mistake for a lion at first glance or the one of a
figure looming in a black overcoat, shoes sunk in snow, as he stands facing the
Manhattan skyline when the Twin Towers were still there, a manikin propped on his
shoulder.
How many patrons even know of the ceramic art of Katherine Hackl in the Princeton
Collection Room, which seems to be off-limits much of the time? This is tile heaven and it
should be seen, even if you have to ask a librarian to let you in for a look.
"Happy World"
It's safe to say that the most popular work of art in the library and the most accessible is
the one filling the wall of the corridor off the lobby entrance, the patchwork parade people
entering from the new parking deck see before they see anything else. Ik-Joong Kang's
mixed-media wall mosaic of 3,700 three-by-three inch tiles, "Happy World," is a
masterful collaboration with and about the Princeton community.
Try the Van Winkle point of view again. You can almost see him leaning on his cane,
shoulders stooped, mouth a little less agape as he muses and smiles his way up and
down and across the wall of many colors. However overwhelmed he might have been by
the brave new world of the building and all its 21st-century machinery, he can find
familiar things here, ordinary images from the previous century, messages like "For me,
real entertainment is the interplay between heart and mind," not in cold type but written by
hand. You know he'd smile to read a poem called "The Prayer of the Fox" by an eightyear-old. What better way to ease his entry back into the world on the other side of his
long nap?
Try another, darker point of view: with the devastation of Katrina in mind, this
conglomeration of odds and ends can be turned around to represent the opposite of a
happy world, the flotsam and jetsam of civilization swept away in a chaotic tide, not unlike
the letters and photos and souvenirs and cherished scraps of memory destroyed by the
hurricane and the flood in New Orleans. Turn it at another angle and the wall becomes a
magnificent salvage job, a whole community of items rescued in a single playful vision, a
quilt of many colors that ultimately holds its own against the forces of nature: happy, yes,
and bright, and bountiful.
Now try the poet/anthropologist's point of view. Imagine someone at an archaelogical dig
in 3005 looking for clues to the way we lived in this melange of plastic dogs, coffee mugs,
toy cars, keys with faded tags you can almost read, a notice from 1909 about the Free
Public Library, a bowling pin, a Buddha, the exposed innards of a parking meter, a
badminton racket, a harmonica, playing cards, a squash racket, a Phish CD, a compass,
the faces of children you seem to know, and families, and even a library card from that
piece of antiquity called a card catalogue. In the end, the diggers speculate that this
ancient mural must have enjoyed a prominent place in the town's most prominent building,
the center of the community, where people came to enjoy it and smile and be assured
that the thread of art somehow tied their world together.
That's the beauty of it: it all works, it balances out. The Happy World imagery is picked up
in other library art: in the pattern and colors of the quilt above the fireplace on the second
floor, in Maargaret K. Johnson's layered textiled wall sculpture, in the use of thread in
Buzz Spector's "The Irony" and "What Next," even in the doll's house and the aquarium on
the third floor, and especially in Faith Ringgold's cut glass tile mosaic "Tar Beach" with its
deep blue urban night sky, family at table, kids on a blanket, and a figure taking flight in
the sky.
Ik-Joong Kang was born in Korea near an American military base whose souvenir shop
gave him an early look at the cross-cultural interface he would later explore, manifesting
the idea that nothing is trivial; that nothing is merely, boringly random but can make funny
sense when you put it in a fertile context; that coincidence is art, everything's in play,
everything's of use, because, as this artist has said (probably on one of his haiku-like
tiles): "Art is easy."
Chicago Sun-Times, Dec 18, 2005
The Greatest: Muhammad Ali Center
A showcase for global ideals
by Dave Hoekstra
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Just as Elvis Presley's Graceland is the symbol of a Southern dream,
the Muhammad Ali Center will become a "greatland" for global ideals. The Ali Center
opened weeks ago in downtown Louisville with the creed "The Greatest Is Yet to Come."
The Champ now stands with the King as one of the biggest American tourist destinations
devoted to one person. And while Elvis had a hit with "Kentucky Rain," Ali reigns in
Kentucky and beyond.
The Ali Center -- only a portion of which features boxing memorabilia -- even has a
bejeweled jumpsuit titled "The People's Choice" that was a gift to Ali from the King. Ali
first wore it into the ring, appropriately enough, in Las Vegas on Feb. 14, 1973, where he
whupped Joe Bugner in 12 rounds.
The new six-story facility in Ali's hometown consists of 40 interactive exhibits,
incorporating 19 different languages. Many exhibits are geared toward children.
And they're about something more than Ali himself.
"When we embarked on this project we made it clear we did not want the Ali Center to be
a place that idolized Muhammad," said Lonnie Ali, the 49-year-old wife of Muhammad Ali.
The center opened on Nov. 19, the couple's 19th wedding anniversary. "Rather, it is about
the spirituality of the human being and how it centers a person, the way it centered
Muhammad."
A heartwarming anchor of the Ali Center is a colorful 55-foot- long installation composed
of more than 5,000 tile drawings by children from 141 countries. The "Hope and Dream"
project is designed by New York-based Korean artist Ik-Joong Kang and is underwritten
by actress Angelina Jolie.
Children were asked to depict their hopes for the future and wishes for the world. Zaki
from Afghanistan wrote, "I am 8 years old, an Afghan girl dreaming of education and
employment." A child from Israel wrote "Peace," along with two men shaking hands.
The $80 million Ali Center honors peace, respect and social responsibility. In fact, the Nov.
19 opening night gala was delayed by 40 minutes because President Bill Clinton was
meeting with the Ali family. Their conversation reportedly included the vision of using the
Ali Center as a location for conflict resolution in the spirit of the United Nations.
==============================================================
Angelo, August/December 2004
Buddha with Lucky Objects
Ik-Joong Kang
By Karen Gahafer
Small and inexpensive, everyday items take on a spiritual meaning when arranged by
Korean American artist IL-Joong Kang, who lives and works in New York City, first arrived
in America, he was fascinated with objects that the consumers purchased here.
Over the years the native of Chrong Ju, Korea collected mass quantities of these treasures
from five- and- dime stores, objects such as hand held blenders, plastic souvenirs, and
even small children's toys like a metal xylophone.
Recently the fruits of this undertaking made an appearance in the exhibition: "Buddha with
Lucky Objects," which is installed in Speed's Presences Gallery.
The artist, who received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Hong-IK University in Seoul in 1984
and a Master of Fine Art in 1987 from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, is noted for his small
format compositions in which he meticulously re-creates a larger, more interactive
installation piece, which invites the viewer to experience the whole work of art.
The area is silent as the viewer walks up the ramp and enters the door. To the left of the
door, an exposed area is circumfused with gold, inviting curiosity to come take a closer
look.
Upon entering is silence. Inside this dimly lit space, three concaved panels with
thousands of small Buddha figures, painted on wood block, are placedto create intrigue.
As the viewers come closer to the central circular enclosure, they see hundreds of objects
that kang collected; also sound begins to fill this space.
Tiny chime-like sounds echo throughout as the walls vibrate, as if a presence other than
the occupant exists. Once the viewer ceases to move, the sounds diminish; again there is
silence.
Kang explains that the viewer sees, Buddha, Buddha sees the standing person, and in
turn the viewer then reflects on him or herself in the silence.
Julien Robson, the curator of Contemporary Art and visionary behind presence, explains
this installation piece, "In one sense it becomes this really interesting cultural hybridity the
repetition of Buddha and creation of an almost sort of sanctuary space; this space
becoming spiritual."
Robson added, "The area in which the wooden Buddha figure is seated will be heavely lit.
Then the sense of it is something that makes you present. It is acknowledgment of the
presence in which you are the controller."
An interesting juxtaposition adds to this exhibit. The surroundings of the outer exterior of
the museum room, which houses the Presence gallery, is filled with Christian tapestry,
while the interior space is filled with Buddha Spirituality.
"It is like inside a temple," Lanna Versluys, community Relation of The Speed said.
When asked what response he was trying to evoke in the viewer when they encounter
"Buddha with lucky Object, Kang replied, "I want the viewers to swim freely experiencing
my art in an intellectual playground."
Kang's work is about the past and present; interviewed are experiences upon his arriving
in the United States and influences from his Korean childhood, like the shamans in the
village from where he once lived. His piece connected them for the viewer to feel on a
spiritual level. "Buddha with Lucky Object" is also about identity. Kang explains that he is a
tightrope walker. In the center he hold the stick in which he must balance the past and the
present.
============================================================
Press Release, 2004
Happy World at Princeton Public Library
Would you like to build a wall of peace?
by Nancy Russell
Would you like to join an artist’s dream of creating a virtual mural using children’s
drawings?
Artist Ik-Joong Kang, who is known for his large-scale projects that are
composed of
thousands of 3” x 3” small paintings, sculptures and text art,
dreams of
collecting one million drawings from children all over the world and creating a mural of art
on the internet where children can locate their own drawings, scroll across the virtual wall
to look at other’ children’s work and share their dreams and messages in a world without
boundaries.
“World peace is a big room.
To get in there, the key is children’s dreams,”
Kang
says.
Kang worked with children in South Korea in 1999 to create “100,000
Dreams”.
Thousands of drawings made by South Korean children were displayed inside
a one-kilometer long greenhouse near the demilitarized zone, that was lit up at night, one
writer explains, as if to lure “North Korean children on the other side to come out and
play.”
Kang followed this project with “Amazed World,” an installation composed of 34,000
children’s drawings from all over the world, at the headquarters of the United Nations in
New York.
The installation was to open on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Kang, who
lives in New York, was in the U.N. building when tragedy struck in lower Manhattan.
“The
children’s dreams were uptown, but the public couldn’t see them because downtown was
on fire,” he says.
He had assembled thousands of drawings from children living in more
than 125 countries into a large-scale installation which remained on display for one year
at the U.N.
From the mountains, the cities, the seaside, “children were able to sit
alongside each other,” Kang says, because “although they never met, the drawings were
displayed on the wall together.”
Now the Korean-born artist would like to collect a million drawings and take children’s
dreams to a bigger stage.
“Amazed World 2” will extend his vision of building a “wall of
peace through children’s dreams” on the internet, by posting children’s drawings on a
virtual mural on the internet site, www.amazedworld.com.
The drawings should be drawn in crayon on a 3-inch by 3-inch square piece of paper
and the artwork will be scanned onto a virtual mural on the internet at
www.amazedworld.com.
Children will be invited to submit drawings in crayon on a 3-
inch by 3-inch square piece of paper via the mail and also electronically, that depict their
dreams for themselves and the world, “what they wish for, what they would like to share
with others,” he says.
Each drawing will be assigned an address or identification code
so that children will be able to log onto the website and locate their own drawing, as well
as enjoy the art work of others.
When Kang has accumulated enough drawings, he would like to incorporate them into a
15-foot-high, one-mile-long curtain of laminated art that will stretch across the Imjin
River that divides North Korea and South Korea.
“Children’s art and children’s dreams can connect the two countries, which have been
separated for over 50 years,” he says.
“This will be like a wall of art that can break down
the wall that has caused pain, hunger and suffering on both sides.”
“The division of North and South Korea is not only a Korean problem, it’s a world
problem.
If we can solve this problem, we can solve the world’s problems.”
==========================================================
Princeton Public Library mural will be multlingual
By Jennifer Potash
Upon discovering that over 50 languages are spoken in Princeton, artist Ik-Joong Kang
has decided to capture the town's international flavor in the mural he is designing for the
new Princeton Public Library.
Mr. Kang invites Princeton students in kindergarten through grade 12 who are native
speakers of one of the 54 world languages spoken in households in the Princeton
Regional School District to write the word "library" (without quotation marks) in their native
language or script on a 3-inch-square paper using ink, crayon, marker, paint or any
material other than pencil.
The paper should also include the name of the language, but not the country in which it is
spoken, written in English. He also welcomes submissions of the word "library" written in
English, as well as original artwork on 3-inch-square paper.
An accompanying sheet of paper should include the name of the student and his or her
school and grade. Both sheets should be placed in a single plastic sandwich bag and
submitted to the library by Feb. 21. Selected entries will be mounted on 3-inch blocks of
wood and incorporated into the 30-foot mural, titled "Happy World," which will contain
about 5,000, 3-inch-square paintings by the artist.
Mr. Kang visited the library on Jan. 17 to collect small objects submitted by the
community for the mural and was impressed by the extent of Princeton's cultural diversity,
said Nancy Russell, a library trustee and chairwoman of the library's Art Committee.
"When he learned from our committee that so many world languages were spoken natively
in Princeton homes, he was delighted," Ms. Russell said. "He was very responsive to ideas
that would include this fact about the town's culture and linguistic diversity."
According to the Princeton Regional Schools, the following languages are spoken as
native tongues in the homes of Princeton students in the district: Afrikaans, Akan, Amharic,
Arabic, Armenian, Ashanti, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cantonese, Catalan,
Creole-Haitian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Ewe, Farsi, Finnish, Flemish, French, Ga,
Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese,
Korean, Lithuanian, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Quecha, Romanian,
Russian, Spanish, Slovenian, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Taiwanese, Telugu, Turkish,
Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek and Yoruba.
Mr. Kang prefers that the world language project be child-oriented, said Jeff Nathanson,
the library's art project manager. Adults also may submit an offering and all will be
delivered to the artist.
Mr. Kang, 43, was born in Cheong Ju, South Korea, and moved at age 24 to New York,
where he now lives with his wife and son. His work is widely exhibited, including
exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and a 2001 work, "Amazed World," which included 34,000
children's drawings from 135 countries, displayed at the United Nations.
==============================================================
Princeton packet, Friday, march 12, 2004
Portrait of the artist
By Jillian Kalonick
The daily walk from artist Ik-Joong Kang's home in the east village of Manhattan to his
studio in Brooklyn takes an hour and 10 minutes. It is peaceful ritual for Mr. Kang, perhaps
because before he had time to work in a studio, he used his bus and subway commutes
to work and school for painting, working on portable three-inch-square canvases.
Mr. Kang built those small paintings into cohesive works, and the tiled, three-dimensional
collage effect became his unique style. It is the format he will uses for "Happy World," a
10-foot by 30- foot installation for the lobby of Princeton public library's new building on
Witherspoon Street.
Princeton residents donated more than 500 objects to be incorporated into "Happy
World," which will contain about 5,000 three-inch squares. Its look will be similar to Mr.
Kang's "gateway," a permanent installation at San Francisco International airport, and
"Throw Everything Together and Add," which won the special merit prize at the Venice
Biennale in 1997.
"I use a lot of objects on top of my painting. I thought it was interesting to let their idea
and sprit flow into this wall," he says of "Happy World" The squares look almost like books,
stacked cover-up.
Mr. Kang who earned a master's of fine arts degree at the Pratt institute in Brooklyn, has
exhibited his works at the Whitney museum of American Art at Philip Morris, the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea.
In "Happy World," he is focused on the intersections of the Princeton community, between
the academic installations and the town, the young and old.
"By building this wall we can break the wall- the wall between communities, generations,
between past and future," he says.
Along with his wife and five-year-old son, Mr. Kang has visited Princeton several times.
He had an opportunity to interact with the community in January when he made a visit to
the temporary library in the Princeton Shopping Center to collect materials for "Happy
World."
There was this energy and vibration, so warm," he says. "There was a long discussion,
with donors explaining about the objects. It was a positive interaction. Traditional public
art is a reaction. This one I want to make more level - interacting, sharing with community,
learning about other cultures."
During recent visit to Mr. Kang's studio on the top floor of a warehouse in the DUMBO
section of Brooklyn, he and his assistants were surrounded by hundreds of the Princeton
pieces. Many items are specific to Princeton history: a picture of Paul Robeson, a piece
of copper gutter from a Princeton house built in 1948, and many family photographs and
letters. Among the more whimsical pieces are a "librarian action figure," a South Indian
mask, sea shells, a library card, a Wiffle ball, a clock from the old library on Witherspoon
Street, cards from the old paper library catalog and a Rubik's cube.
"Happy World" will be installed over a period of two days before the library's April 1
opening. Participants who donated items will be recognized in a formal documentation,
says Jeff Nathanson, of library's art committee. The committee commissioned the
installation and several other art works to be displayed in the new library.
"The thing that amazes me bout the artwork is it's an extension of his personality and the
way he views the world," says Mr. Nathanson. "It's really deep, inspired, thoughtprovoking work that functions on a level of interest to artist and critics and curators, as
well as communicating effectively to the general public. It's rare to find an artist these
days that can (either) be in a museum or public realm."
When Mr. Kang discovered that more than 50 languages are spoken in Princeton
households, he invited local students to write the word "library" in their native language on
a piece of paper. At least one square from each language will be incorporated into "Happy
World."
"The past is knowledge, and there's a vision of future for our children. (The library) is a
meeting place for different backgrounds."
Mr. Kang's inclusion of contributions by children echoes his work "100,000 Dreams"
(1999), which featured 50,000 drawings from Korean children in the interior of a onekilometer-long vinyl tunnel in the demilitarized zone in South Korea.
The work has particularly emotional for Mr. Kang, who was born in 1960 in Cheong Ju,
South Korea, and has lived in New York City since 1984.
"I'm part of Korea, and Korea is part of me - and (it is) divided. I thought, 'As an artist,
what can I do for that?'"
The installation incorporates drawings of children's dreams, but he was able to obtain
drawings by children from South Korea only, so half of the canvases were left blank to
represent children from North Korea.
"It was emotionally really touching," says Mr. Kang. "Before the 20th century went way, I
had to make a statement, a bridge to the future."
His installation, "Amazed World," displayed at the United Nation in New York City in 2001,
expanded this idea with contributions by children from more than 125 countries. In a letter
to children he wrote "Hello, I would like to gather all of your dreams for the future and
show them in one place so everyone can see! What is your dream? I am very curious
about how you imagine your future, the future of the world."
The thousands of drawings he received for the project, and still receives, had a particular
resonance on the morning of the opening for "Amazed World" - Sept. 11, 2001.
"Children's vision is very clear, simple - they want peace," he says. "A child's drawing is a
small window - if you stand far away you can't see. If you stand close to the hole, you
see everything. I have to really listen to them. Our generation needs to make a tiny vision
really big. We don't have a future without children. We cannot rely on ourselves; children
are our only hope…the Princeton piece is part of that."
=============================================================
Town Topics, Feb. 4, 2004
Library Artist Seeks World Language Student
Editorial department
Artist Ik-Joong kang invites Princeton students who are native speakers of one of the 54
world languages spoken in households in the Princeton Regional School district to
contribute to the 30-foot mural he is creating for the new Princeton Public Library.
Students in kindergarten through grade 12 are asked to write the word "library" in their
native language or sprite on a three-inch square paper using ink, crayon, maker, painter,
or any material other than pencil. The paper should also include the name of the language,
but not the country in which it is spoken, written in English.
Mr. Kang also welcomes submissions of the word "library" written in English, as well as
original artwork on three square papers. As accompanying sheet of paper should the
name of the student and his or her school and grade. Both sheets should be placed in a
single plastic sandwich bag and Saturday, Feb. 21.
Selected entries will be mounted on three-inch blocks of wood and incorporated into the
mural, titled "Happy World," which will contain about 5,000 small, square paintings by the
artist.
According to the Princeton Regional Schools, the following languages are spoken as
native tongues in the homes of Princeton students in the district: Afrikaans, Akan, Amharic,
Arabic, Armenian, Ashanti, Burmese, Cantonese, Catalan, Creole, Haitian, Czech, Danish,
Dutch, Flemish, French, Ga, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi,
Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish,
Portuguese, Quecha, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Slovenian, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil,
Taiwanese, Telugu, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, and Yoruba.
Mr. Kang prefers that the world language projects that the world language project be
child-oriented, said Jeff nathanson, the library's art project manager. However adults also
may submit an offering, and all will be delivered to the artist.
Mr. Kang, 43, was born in Cheong Ju, South Korea, and moved to New York at age 24,
where he now lives with his wife and son. His work is widely exhibited, including
exhibitions at the Whitney museum of American Art in New York, the museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angles, and a 2001 work, "Amazed World," which included
34,000 children's drawings from 135 countries, displayed at the Untied Nations.
============================================================
Princeton Packet, Feb.3, 2004
Library Mural will be Multilingual
By Editorial Department
Upon discovering that over 50 languages are spoken in Princeton, artist Ik-Joong Kang
has decided to capture the town's international flavor in the mural he is designing for the
new Princeton Public library.
Mr. Kang invites Princeton students in kindergarten through grade 12 who are native
speakers of in households in Princeton Regional School Distric to write the word "Library"
(without quotation marks) in their native language or script on a 3-inch-square paper
using ink, crayon, marker, paint or any material other than pencil.
The paper should also include the name of the language, but not the country in which it
is spoken, written in English.
He also welcomes submissions of the word "library" written in English, as well as original
artwork on 3-inch-square paper.
An accompanying sheet of paper should include the name of the student and his or her
school and grade. Both sheets should be placed in a single plastic sandwich bag and
submitted to the library by Feb.21.
Selected entries will be mounted on 3-inch block of wood and incorporated into the 30foot mural, titles "Happy World," which will contain about 5,000,3-inch-square painting by
the artist.
Mr. Kang visited the library on Jan. 17 to collect small objects submitted by the
community for the mural and was impressed by the extent of Princeton's cultural diversity,
said Nancy Russell, a library trustee and chairwoman of the library's Art committee.
"When he learned from our committee that so many world languages were spoken natively
in Princeton homes, he was delighted," Ms. Russell said. "He was very responsive to ideas
that would include this fact about the town's culture and linguistic
diversity."
According to the Princeton regional School, the following languages are spoken as native
tongues in the homes of Princeton students in the district: Afrikaans, Akan, Amharic,
Arabic, Armenian, Ashanti, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cantonese, Catalan,
Creole-Haitian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Ewe, Farsi, Finnish, Flemish, French, Ga,
Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese,
Korean, Lithuanian, Mandarin, Norwegian, polish, Portuguese, Quecha, Romanian,
Russian, Spanish, Slovenian, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Taiwanese, Telugu, Turkish,
Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek and Yoruba.
Mr. Kang prefers that the world language project be child-oriented said Jeff Nathanson,
the library's art project manager. Adults also may submit an offering and all will be
delivered to the artist.
Mr. Kang, 43, was born in Cheong Ju, South Korea, and moved at age 24 to New York,
where he now lives with his wife and son. His work is widely exhibited, including
exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and a 2001 work, "Amazed World," which included 34,000
children's drawings from 135 countries, displayed at the United Nations.
===========================================================
Town topics, January 14, 2004
Community Invited to Help Create Art for New Library
by Susan Thomas
Princeton public Library and artist Ik-Joong Kang are inviting the Princeton community to
participate in the creation of a mural for the first floor lobby of the new library, scheduled
to open in April.
Kang will be at the library's temporary location in Princeton shopping center on Saturday,
Jan.17, from 10 a.m. to noon to meet the community and to collect materials for possible
inclusion in the 30-foot- long work titles "Happy World." Kang will speak about the work
and answer questions during an 11 a.m. presentation.
Small objects from the Princeton community will be colleted to incorporate with almost
5,000, three-by-three-inch paintings created by knag related to the town's past and
culture.
"By including contributes personal or historical objects from the community, 'Happy
World' will help to generate a friendly and educational atmosphere for the new library," Mr.
Kang said.
"And it will function as a bridge connecting many different cultures in the community and
enabling the public to envision the future through Princeton's past."
Emphasizing that this project is not a competition, Kang said he hopes to gather hundreds
of objects from people of all ages and backgrounds.
The public may bring personal, family or historical objects, images, or words for the artist
to include. Selected items contributed by the public will be included without attribution.
However, a list of all who contribute to the artwork will be publicly displayed.
Those interested in offering printed artifacts, either in the form of a single word, text, form,
a letter, or publication, may participate in a community "write-on" wall at the library on the
day of the event.
Kang will accept any item smaller than four inches in diameter, except for fragile, musty or
hazardous materials. Library volunteers will collect items and mark all contributions with
the name of the owner.
Materials included in the final work will not be returned. Those that are considered but not
included will be available for pickup at the library at a date to be announced.
Priority will be given to items received on Saturday, Jan.17. However, those who are
unable to attend that day may drop their items off at the library before Tuesday, Jan.20.
Mr. Kang, 43, lives in New York City. He was born in Cheong Ju, South Korea and Moved
to New York when he was 224. He received his mater of fine arts degree from Pratt
Institute in Brooklyn.
Kang had exhibited widely, including a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American
Art at Philip Morris, New York; a two-person show with Nam June Paik at the Whitney
Museum of American Art at Champion, Connecticut; and group exhibitions at The Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany, and the
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea.
In the Spring of 1997, he was awarded the Special Merit prize in the 47th Venice Biennale.
Mr. Kang's commissioned project is one of seven new artworks being created for the new
library. Other artists creating works for the library include faith Ringgold, Tom Nussbaum,
Margaret K. Johnson, Katherine Hackl, Armando Sosa and Buzz Spector.
The new state-of- the- art, 55,000-square-foot library, at the corner of Witherspoon and
Wiggins streets in Princeton Borough, is scheduled to open in April. The library's
temporary quarters are in Princeton Shopping Center, 301 N. Harrison st., Princeton
Township.
===========================================================
The Trenton Times, Jan. 18, 2004
Artwork by donation
Bits, pieces arrive for library mural
By Chris Karmoil
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an artistic vision is worth thousands of
pictures to Korean painter Ik-Joong Kang. The 43 tears-old artist who has worked in New
York for 20years assembles tens of thousands of 3-by-inch paintings for his murals and
installations, shown in museums, galleries and public spaces worldwide.
His latest work, "Happy World," a 10by-30-foot arched-wall work mural, will stand at the
entrance of the new $18million Princeton public Library is scheduled to open April 1.
"Once we saw his work we just got so excited we called him immediately," said Leslie
Burger, Library director. If all art is borrowed art, then Kang's work will truly fit that
definition. A collaboration between the artist and the community, it will feature hundreds
of donated objects-some of which Princeton locals brought to the Library's temporary
space at the Princeton shopping center yesterday-including photos and drawings toys,
items found on nature, craft, decoration and symbolic objects.
"As an artist, I'm like a fisherman," kang said of collection the various objects. "We cast a
fishing rod; scientists bring in the fish; economists chop it up; politicians distribute the
pieces. Without the artist's imagination casting the rod, nothing happens."
Kang uses the donated objects whole, or cuts pieces of them to adhere to 3-inch-squre
pine blocks. He encases larger objects in clear plastic or attaches them to the blocks with
sealants.
"Is this where I bring the stuff?" a woman asked as she approached the folding table
where kang and Library workers sat sorting through plastic Ziploc bags, giving the
appearance of a major archeological dig.
Kil Jae Park, who works for the Princeton Theological Seminary, brought a picture of his
children, dressed in traditional outfits.
"The pictures hold so many significant meaning for us," Park said. "It tells us stories in
visual ways. I knew that his work reflects the multicultural world we live in."
"I heard there are 55 different languages spoken in Princeton," artist kang said."
"I hope this mural and installation can be like crossing different cultures and ethnicities."
Kang will use his own found objects and painting on most of the mural's nearly 5,000
wood blocks, which he then adheres to 2-foot-square panels. Those panels, assembled
in his Brooklyn studio, will be brought to the Princeton library for final assembly of the
story- telling wall.
"There are a lot of walls between neighbors and even countries," kang said yesterday."
"By making the wall of art, I believe we can break down walls between each other."
Kang's recent work includes a half mile wall of more than 50,000 south Korean children's
pictures, entitled "100,000 dreams," assembles under a snaking vinyl tent in the demilitarized zone between north and South Korea. "Artwork has an important power," kang
said. "It's a starting point of awareness."
His installation "Amazed world" featured 35,000 children's pictures from 135 countries. It
was set to open at the United nations on Sep.11, 2001, but was postponed for several
weeks after the world Trade center attack.
Kang plans to use 365 donated objects, which the library will collect until Saturday, in his
mural. He is one of seven artists commissioned to create works for the new library. Almost
$300,000 was appropriated for the art works.
The other commissions includes a layered fabric wall installation by Princeton artist
Margaret K Johnson; a traditional Guatemalan Armando Sosa; hand painted tiles by
Lambertville artist Kathrine Hackl; a handmade book including the names of the library's
donors by Buzz Spector, chair of Cornell University's art department; a "tar Beach"inspired mosaic by Englewood artist and writer faith Ringgold; and whimsical figures by
Montclair sculptor Tom Nussbaum.
Many of the nearly 200 items the library collected yesterday were brought by children, but
some without their knowing.
"I had to capture my 7-year-ond daughter's sprit," said artist and Princeton resident Eva
Mantell as she handed over a pencil drawing of a cocker spaniel in a hula skirt, drawn by
her daughter Miranda. She also brought a beaded artwork made by her son, an ink
drawing made by her children's great grandmother and one of her own photographs, a
"television college."
"It's obviously his unique vision," Mantell said of Kang's mural, but somehow he's allowed
people to come into it. I like how it's communal and personal.
==============================================================
Princeton Packet, Jan.13 2004
Artist invites public to donate artifacts for library's new mural
By Jennifer Potash
A new project at the Princeton public Library offers the public the chance to have a part in
the creation of a work of art for the new downtown building, which is nearing completion.
Internationally acclaimed artist IK-Joong kang is creating a mural for the first- floor lobby
of the library, slated to open in April.
Mr. Kang will collect materials for inclusion in the 30- foot mural, titles "happy World,"
Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon at the library's temporary location at the Princeton
shopping center. He will also talk about the work-in-progress and answer questions
during an 11 a.m. presentation.
Small objects collected from the Princeton community will be incorporated with almost
5,000 3-by-3-inch painting created by Mr. Kang related to the town's past and culture.
"By including contributed personal or historical objects from the community,
'Happy World; will help to generate a friendly and educational atmosphere for the new
library," Mr. Kang said. "And it will function as a bridge connecting many different cultures
in the community and enabling the public to envision the future through Princeton's past."
Mr. Kang is one of several artists commissioned by the Princeton public library to create
permanent art works throughout the new three-story building at the corner of Witherspoon
and Wiggins streets. The others are Faith Ringgold, Tom Nussbaum, Margaret K. Johnson,
Katherine Hackl, Armando Sosa and Buzz Spector.
The library's volunteer Art Committee, comprising local and consultants, suggested the
artists to the library's board of trustees in November.
By viewing the mural, library visitors and patrons may trace Princeton's amazing history
and the life stories of neighbors along with thousands of images created by the artist,
said Jeff Nathanson, a consultant to the library's art committee. The project is not a
competition, Mr. Kang emphasizes. He said he would like to gather hundreds of objects
from people of all ages and backgrounds.
The public may bring personal, family or historical objects, images or words for inclusion
by the artist.
Selected items contributed by the public will be included without attribution but a list all
participants will be publicly displayed. Those interested in offering printed artifacts, ether
in the form of a single word, text from a letter or publication or otherwise, may participate
in a community "write-on" wall at the library on the day of the event. Mr. Kang will accept
any item smaller than 4inches in diameter, except for fragile, musty or hazardous materials.
Library volunteers will collect the items and mark all contributions with the name of the
owner. Materials included in the final work will not be returned.
Items that are considered but not included will be available for pickup at the library at a
date to be announced.
Priority will be given to items received on Jan. 17 but individuals unable to attend the
session may drop their items off at the library before Jan.20.
Mr. Kang , 43, was born in Cheong Ju, South Korea, and moved at age 24 to New York,
where he now lives his wife and son.
He received his mater of fine arts degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
His work is widely exhibited, including a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York; a two- person shoe with Nam June Paik at the Whitney
Museum of American Art at champion, Conn.; and group exhibitions at the Museum of
contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul,
Korea.
In the Spring of 1997, he was awarded the Special merit prize in the 47th Venice Biennale.
Mr. Kang's 2001 work, "Amazed World," which included 34,000 children's drawings from
135 countries, is displayed at the United Nations.
===========================================================
The Princeton Packet, December 12, 2003
Library Mural to Tell Princeton's Story
By Jennifer Potash
A tiger's tale from a costume, a picture of the fallen Mercer oak, a brick from the old
Princeton Public Library -these are all items that may comprise a major work of art at the
new downtown library.
IK-Joong Kang, one of the artists selected to beautify the new Princeton Public Library,
discussed his work-in-progress Tuesday at the library construction site during a tour of
the building with members of the library's art committee. Mr. Kang will create a 60-footlong wall of approximately 6,000, 3-inch- square paintings based on images and objects
relating to Princeton history and culture. The mural will be displayed along the community
room's somewhat curved exterior wall that runs between the front lobby and rear entrance
from the parking garage.
Mr. Kang said he hopes library visitors will discover a new image each time they walk by.
"It will generate its own ideas and energy," said Mr. Knag, 43.
In early January, members of the community will be invited to submit small items or
images for possible inclusion in the mural. While somewhat shy about discussing his past
accomplishments such as "amazed World," a 2001 piece considering of 34,000 children's
drawings from 135 countries displayed at the United Nations- Mr. Kang is more
enthusiastic about the upcoming Princeton work.
"I think I will stack them one by one like books on shelves. He said his mural's multiple
paintings. He will have an unusually compressed time schedule the installation is due for
completion in March in advance of the library's expected April 1 opening.
"It will be very hard but I like working under pressure," he said.
Mr. Kang is somewhat familiar with the Princeton area. He used to watch his nephew play
tennis for Princeton University.
The opportunity to display art in a town with an Ivy League university carried a certain
amount of prestige, he said.
"For new immigrants, sending their children to an Ivy League school is almost a religion,"
he said.
He said he looks forward to showing the work to his 5-year-old son, who he hopes may
one day attend Princeton.
Born in Cheong Ju, South Korea, Mr. Kang moved to New York City at age 24.
He earned a master's degree in fine arts from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y.
During his daily travels on the bus or subway to work at a Korean grocery store, Mr. Kang
said he started to work on small canvases.
He exhibited "8,490 days of Memory" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The artwork represents his life in Korea, he said.
Mr. Kang's awards include a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the
Prize of special Merit in the 1997 Venice Biennale.
The other artists creating works for the library are Faith Ringgols, Tom Nussbaum, Maggi
Johnson, Armando Soso, Katherine Hackl and Buzz Speator.
============================================================
Brooklyn Heights Press & Cobble Hill News, November 27, 2003
'Buddha' Artist Explains His 'Diaries' and 'Notes'
By Abby Ranger
Korean- born artist Ik-Joong Kang, Whose installation "Buddha Learning English" is now
on view at the Rotunda Gallery on Clinton Street, says he sees the role of the artist as a
fisherman casting for new ideas, or as a bridge between countries and minds.
He also says he makes art for himself, and that he turns down most galleries that
approach him wanting to show his work. Kang's work does have the quality of personal
document; he calls the three-inch by three-inch paintings he accumulates in the
thousands "diaries." When he installs them in tight rows, they line walls like mosaic tiles.
The Buddha statues that foreground some of three installations, or sit depicted in the tiny
paintings, kang says, are-among other things- metaphors for himself. The habit of
working in so small a format started when kang was a graduate student at Pratt institute in
the mid 80's. He worked 12-hour night shifts at a Korean grocery store in Manhattan,
went to classes all day, and carried his paintings with him in his pockets, working
constantly on subways and buses. Scanning a wall of his tiny paintings, your eyes might
skip over outlines of a spinal cord or a coffee cup, the words "baby wipe" in block
capitals, a tank, what might be a bird, or a phrase like "I saw Spike Lee," or "Art is good
for wasting time."
When Kang's father, also a painter, went blind, kang started caving some of the tiny
images into blocks of wood, so that they can be felt instead of seen.
"Buddha Learning English" at the Rotunda takes a slightly different from Kang's earlier,
tile-like installations. Here, three-inch by three-inch paintings of seated Buddhas are
centered on sheets of letter-sized paper and backed by wooden panels that create 14
foot-tall, curving wall.
Each panel also supports an actual toy or tool of some kind- egg slicers dangle among
plastic dolls, funnels and strainers and Chinese fans. The pages of paper are handwritten word lists, studies of English vocabulary often reading like noun-heavy poems.
One line goes in part, "heroic individuals, national purification, mythic community," and
another, "parakeet auklet, band tailed pigeon, mourning dove."
"They're just notes," Kang said about the word lists. "Just notes to myself."
For an artist so inward-turned that he claims to have never really gone to Chelsea
galleries, Kang, 43, has built a career that hundreds of other New York artists might envy.
His installation at the Venice biennale in1997 won a special Merit award; he has pieces in
the permanent collections of museums in Germany and Spain, in New York's Whitney
museum of American Art and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Kang has also done projects that interest UNICEF more than the art world. In 1999, he
collected three-inch by three-inch drawings from 50,000 children in South Korea, and
then installed the children's work in a kilometer- long, internally lit vinyl tunnel in the
demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. The intention was to complement the
drawings with another 50,000 from North Korean children, but ultimately, when his many
letters weren't replied, Kang left half the tunnel blank.
He followed that project with a similar installation, two years later in the lobby of New
York's United Nations building, of three-inch by three-inch drawings by children from 139
countries.
Stacks of those children's drawings, each sealed to the front of a wooden block, are still
heaped in Kang's 4,000 square foot studio on DUMBO. He has worked in that eleventh
floor space for three years now, sometimes with a crew of up to 25 volunteers.
Every morning, kang walks south along the East River from his Stuyvesant Town
apartment over the Manhattan Bridge to his Jay Street studio. Almost everyday, he and his
assistants take a lunch break bike ride along the Brooklyn side of the river, down to Red
hook.
Looking out at the river and the bridge from his studio's roof one chilly afternoon this
week, Kang talked about notions of translation and communication that he was mulling
over when he created the current version of "Buddha Learning English," a project has
revisited several times.
"For me, art is not about telling people what I see," he explained. "It's about telling
myself."
=============================================================
Exhibition Catalogue, 2003
Ik-Joong Kang at Sabina Lee Gallery, LA, CA
By James Glass
Upon his arrival in New York, Ik-Joong Kang enrolled at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. There,
he developed the 3x3-inch format during his days as a student. The format was made
primarily outside of the classroom in response to his practical necessity at the time. That
is, as an impoverished student, he worked twelve-hours a day at a Korean grocery store
in Manhattan and also as a watchman at a flea market in Far Rockaway, Queens. Looking
for ways to effectively utilize time spent on the long subway rides, he fit 3-inch-square
canvases easily into his pocket and into the palm of his hand. His lengthy commute was
transformed into work time in a mobile studio.
These miniature canvases functioned like pages in a diary upon which he recorded his
immediate responses to life in a foreign city.
By showing thousands of these memories
as a single installation, he intends the viewers to see the installation as a whole and then
invite them to come closer to see the individual "3x3" of moments of his life.
It is by these miniatures that the artist frees himself from the traditional confrontation and
struggle of full-size canvases. He feels liberation by the small scale and an openness to
express the tiniest of ideas.
The overall mood of Kang's installations is meditative. Their intent is personal and directed
toward self-reflection, rather than social commentary. Kang's ideas are intuitively
expressed and suggest a "process of adopting, rejecting, and merging cultural heritage
with cultural environment."1)
Kang wants viewers to embrace different cultures. He says, 'Learning is a two-way street
and in the twenty-first century, we need to give and receive'.
special merit at the 1997 Venice Biennale, Kang's
Awarded a citation for
In 'I Have to Learn Chinese', 1997, the
title's imperative tone urges the viewer to join the artist in memorizing its cloisonne-like
strips of Chinese characters. Comprised of ninety poplar panels, the elongated
rectangular forms epitomise Kang's desire to 'grow into a big tree that does not fall'.
The
panels join together to form a trunk with roots deeply embedded in the past, a past that:
'both the individual and the nation should know about. People talk about globalization, but
in order to accomplish that, we have to really plunge ourselves into the past. It's sort of
like trying to jump when you're in a swimming pool - you can't really jump unless you
push yourself from the pool bottom.' Throughout the 'Learning' series, Kang notes that
'people are uncertain about the future and restless when it comes to the past'. The
purpose of his work, then, is 'to eliminate both that uncertainty and restlessness'.2)
Though many of his earlier works were produced from the perspective of the newly arrived
immigrant, it is evident in his later work that Kang is a first-generation Korean-American
and a voracious consumer of all cultures, but it should be noted that he is especially
concerned with the children's voice from around the world.
In December 1999, Kang worked with children from South Korea to create the "100,000"
Dreams." Thousands of children's miniature drawings styled in his signature 3 inch x 3-
inch canvases were displayed inside a one-kilometer vinyl tube in the wasteland near the
South Korean demilitarized zone. At night, the gigantic tube lit up like a fat glowworm,
hoping to attract North Korean children on the other side to come out and play. And more
recently, in the visitors' lobby of the United Nations in New York, nearly 34,000 children's
drawings from over 136 countries are incorporated into Kang's installation.
Kang often compares his own work to the Korean dish of 'bibimbap', a hodgepodge of
vegetables and meats mixed with rice that is an everyday meal found on any street corner
in Korea. He believes that like bibibap his art improves with each new element. As if to
prove it, he has created over 100,000 works-three-by-three-inch drawings, paintings,
woodcuts, and ceramic tiles-since 1984. "My motto," says the 43-year-old artist, "is to
throw everything together and add." 3)
Footnotes
1) Louis Grachos, 'Ik-Joong Kang, exhibition catalogue, Queens Museum, 1992.
2) joan Kee, 'Living on the edge', Art Art Pacific, November 19, 1998
3) Carol Lutfy, ART NEWS, March 1997
=============================================================
Sculpture Magazine, Sep. 2002
ik-joong kang in the United Nations
By Jonathan Peyser
In his deeply affecting installation Amazed World, which was due to open on September
11 in conjunction with the United Nations' Special Session on Children, the Korean-born
artist Ik-Joong Kang made richly vivid the ever-important connection between art and the
world. In the Visitor's Center, Kang presented 34,000 children's drawings from 130
countries. The installation abounded with an artistic vision of peace based on the request
for children to draw their hopes and dreams for the future.
The UN exhibition was preceded by Kang's 1999 installation 100,000 Dreams, situated in
the South Korean demilitarized zone. There, the artist created a kilometer-long, serpentine
vinyl tube filled with three-by-three-inch canvases from South Korean children. The walkin sculpture was illuminated at night in order to cast a glow that would encourage North
Korean children to take notice and participate.
In New York, Kang once again created a global house through which one could literally
and imaginatively pass. Amazed World consisted of two corridors, one 10 feet tall, the
other 16 feet tall, both made from children's drawings, mounted to wood blocks (or
bricks) and placed against larger, colored background squares representing the colors of
the world's flags.
The walls were supported by five traditional beams to signify the five conceptual
directions or "activities" of harmony and universe as suggested by the Korean philosophy
of Danchung. Each beam was also silk-screened with the five sacred colors of the
rainbow, as in Korean temples.
In two of the walls, viewers could gravitate to a cut-out window or hollow, which
permitted a view of drawings in the other corridor or of a person passing through,
momentarily framed. The cutouts effectively served as "picture" windows. On top of one
of the walls were what appeared to be sculpted birds of peace. The entire installation was
situated between two sculptures in the UN collection: a floating stainless steel rendition of
the Sputnik satellite and a bronze Poseidon. The siting fused myths and dreams from
ancient through modern times into the future.
In Amazed World, dreams for the future came from children of diverse ethnic and religious
backgrounds, East and West. Many live in areas of profound conflict. One drawing by
seven-year-old Ognami, from Togo, is a simple pencil drawing of a house, a square base
with a triangle-shaped roof with no color. Karabo, a seven-year-old from Botswana,
depicts a girl painting in a lush green field. Nammour, an eight-year-old from Palestine,
draws a floating blue Star of David that commingles tank, helicopter, and machine gun.
Underneath he writes, "Why did the Iraeleans soldiers kill thes baby?"
Kaikio, nine years old, from Japan, draws a child playing piano. Ansah, a seven-year-old
from Ghana, draws a pale-yellow fish. Souliman, a 10-year-old from Syria, draws an
oversized red apple or tomato set against a saffron-yellow background, with the words
"S.O.S. Syria" written below.
Undarmaa, 14 years old, from Mongolia, depicts Garbage-strew mountains with the
command "Keep off the nature." A child who does not sign his work, from the Democratic
Republic of Congo, draws three figures, the first with ears covered, the second with eyes
covered, and the third with mouth covered. Above, the child writes "Les tois sages
d'Afrique - Sourd, Avengle, Muet." Adanou, an eight-year-old from Togo, draws the
simple unadorned outline of a car. It looks like an upside-down frying pan with wheels.
The earnest and varied technical innocence of these drawings make a walk through
Kang's Amazed World captivating and startling. Many of the dreams have, of course, been
punctuated by nightmares of pervasive war, famine, disease, and destitution. The
drawings are unexpurgated. There is a palpable sense that dreams consist of universals:
food and music, animal life and plants, love and friendship, a home with a roof, a car,
honesty, freedom, and peace, a drawing, a cerulean blue sky.
Seeing them through reflected in variously placed mirrors, viewers were ineluctably poised
to embrace the psyche of their youth and the hopes that might have come with it. In the
spirit of a global summit of children's drawings, Kang is currently working on a project at
the site of the former Berlin wall. This new project could teem with the same kind of
engaged audiences as those attending this exhibition at the United Nations.
============================================================
Exhibition Catalog, 2002
Ik-Joong Kang : Cologne Pagoda & other works
Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
by Jaana Pruess
After showing works of Nam June Paiks (born in 1932), for the second time the Museum
fur Ostasiatische Kunst is showing a contemporary Coreanian artist; the installations of IkJoong Kang. The artist, born 1960 in Cheong Ju, Korea and since 1984 living in New York,
is referring to many exhibitions in museums and galleries in Seoul, Tolio and San
Fransisco etc. He has been awarded many scholarships and prices; among others a
special honorable mention at the Venice Biennale. In 1998, with the exhibition ?Im Jahr
des Tigers: Korea¡° (Engl. In the year of the tiger: Korea), the artist was introduced in
Germany in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt by, among others, Ludwig Forum fur
internationale Kunst Aachen and Museum Ludwig Koln (KunstWelten im Dialog;
1999/2000).
His special sign is small paintings and material images in the size of 3x3 inches (ca.
7.5x7.5 cm), which he composes to sequences and installations. This size has its origin in
pragmatically reasons from the time of his studies; the size fits equally in hand and pocket
and can be worked on everywhere. The paintings became modules, who can be
transformed into new compositions and thereby offer a new meaning. Similar to notes out
of a diary, the works show thoughts and fantasies, every day experiences and
observations, or reflect philosophical and profane considerations. A central work in the
exhibition is the ?Cologne Pagoda¡°, which took its rise from a reaction of the attack of
the World Trade Center. The composition of 1500 plastic cubes, all embracing
remembrances and memory objects from Korea and captioned with an American
interpretation of the conflict between North- and South Korea, is reminding of the
unfinished pagoda of the existing conflict in the area.
Crossing boundaries between cultures, Ik-Joong Kang paints his sculptural self-portrait,
integrated in the work, in a way that associates as well with American pop art as with
Coreanian traditions. Next to the figure lies a sculpture of a suitcase, which he carried
during the evacuation of the UNO buildings in New York on the 11th of September. He
wasn't visiting the UN-building by a coincidence; it was the day when his
installation ?Amazed World¡° was to be opened in the lobby of the building in the
presence of the secretary-general of the UN Kofi Annan. The opening of his work was
supposed to be a preparation for the World Child Conference. With support from UNESCO
and innumerable international organizations, the artist had collected 45000 drawings in his
size of 3x3 inches from children of 125 countries for the work 'Amazed World'.
Ik-Joong Kang is taking the exhibition in the Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst as an
occasion to invite children from Berlin to contribute with drawings to the project ?Amazed
World¡°. The pictures collected in the museum are to be installed together with drawings
from the work in New York in Berlin in 2002.
The exhibition is organized in co-operation with the Pruss & Ochs Gallery (former Asian
Fine Arts), Berlin.
============================================================
Exhibition catalog, 2002
Cologne Pagoda and Other Works at National Museum of Asian Art in
Berlin
By Uta Rahman-Steinert
(Curator)
From a distance one has a better view/ one can see things more clearly.
Allusions to the Korean tradition in the work of Ik-Joong Kang
"From a distance one has a better view," replies Ik-Joong Kang to the question, why he
always referenced a full range of diverse aspects of traditional Korean art in his work. The
artist, living in New York since 1984 and surrounded by the achievements of the West,
does not want to delete the images of the culture of his origin. He manifests in his person
as well as in his work, the process of globalization as a fusion of Eastern and Western
cultures. Origin and whereabouts hold less significance in the work of the artist; the more
significant aspects are socialization, spiritual and emotional disposition. A rich quality of
Ik-Joong Kang's work is his passionate inclination to engage with the local particulaties of
his environment; improvisation seems to stimulate and challenge his creativity. Is this a
distinctive feature of Korean culture?
Regardless, the installation shown in San Francisco 1994 was titled "Throw everything
together and add." This work refers to the popular Korean dish bibimbap, which is
prepared by mixing rice with any ingredients at hand.
A similar pragmatism is revealed in the frequent/persistent use of a 3x3 inch format. Born
during the days in art-college, the idea for this format allowed Ik-Joong Kang to do his
art-work wherever he was. By far more significant than the efficiency of this format is the
modular structure of all his works. Ik-Joong Kang arranges the squares in a variety of his
works that are greatly differing in form and content. Modular structures are a common
phenomenon in the eastern Asian culture. The Chinese written language for example
consists of only eight basic lines, functioning as components for more than 50,000 signs,
which has also been used in Korea until the Han'gul-Alphabet was introduced in 1443.
Some elements of these signs can still be found in modern texts. The complex structures
of the traditional stud construction method are built out of prefabricated, standardized
modules: a variety of interlocking wooden pillars and studs constitute the complex
construction of the consolesystems in roofs. An extraordinary achievement in compiling
single parts to form a meaningful whole was realized by Korean monks in the 13th century.
Within 15 years they carved 81,258 wooden printingsticks, each encompassing one bookpage. The largest and oldest collection of existing Buddhist texts, the Korean Tripitaka,
was printed with these sticks.
Ik-Joong Kang composes his works out of modules in the form of small squares.
This format, however varying in size, can be found in the decoration of Korean
architecture or works of craft. Elaborately embellished ... in palasts are pieced together
out of squares, wooden grids divide walls and windows in quadrants, doors and windows
are covered with papersquares. Often, the multifacetted chests of drawers and cases are
decorated with square elements. Similar structures appear in crafted objects out of
textiles and paper. Also evident is the likeness to the wondeful fabrics for wrapping gifts
(pojagi). Having an overall square shape, they are mostly stiched together out of various
colorful small squares of fabric, sometimes printed or painted with a grid. They are
common objects with the aesthetics of abstract works of art. "The
dissection/fragmentation of larger entities into small parts with geomatirical shape,
comparable to a graphic design that repetitively uses related/similar elements" is a
(prominent) trait of Korean art. Also, the chinese characters/signs are fitted into imaginary
squares.
In addition to their common formal features, all four artworks in the exhibition are related
to one another by their reference to Buddhism, the most important of all relevant religions
in Korea. The basic/ constituent element of the "Cologne Pagoda" and of "English
Garden" is the pagoda. This repository of relics, initially developing out of a grave-mound,
is the utmost sacred symbol of Buddhism and often the central building in temple
structures. During rituals the monks walk clockwise around the pagoda. Most of the stillexisting pagodas in Korean are made of stone, preferably out of granite. Its style, however,
is similar to the Chinese wooden pagoda. The pagoda is constructed with an even number
of sides and an uneven number of levels, because the even numbers in eastern Asia are
associated with the principle of the yin (the earth, the depth, the darkness etc.) and the
uneven numbers symbolize the yang (the rising, the heaven, the height, the light). Most of
the Korean pagodas have three or five levels above the base. Ik-Joong Kang's "Cologne
Pagoda" is inspired by the three-leveled pair of padodas in the temple Pulguksa in
Kyongju, that was built around 751 A.D. In one of the two pagodas, the oldest printed text
was found. The "Cologne Pagoda," with its two levels, appears to be in an unfinished
state. Was it destroyed? Fortunately, all the numerous relics are enclosed in plastics,
covering the entire structure/pagoda. Usually, the third level of most Korean pagodas has
a small space for keeping the relics.
==========================================================
Exhibition Catalog
BRIDGES - INTERSPACES - SKY
Pruess & Ochs Gallery
By Jaana Pruess
Within the XXIst World Congress of Architecture UIA 2002 in Berlin, the project, space,
time and architecture¡° takes place in 25 galleries. The sequence of exhibitions, strongly
connected to architecture, is initiated by the involved galleries and the BDA - Bund
Deutscher Architekten.
Finding ideas in the collaboration with Ik-Joong Kang, the Buro 213 related to the collides
of different worlds in the works of the artist and to the bipolar ways of working which the
artist uses. Starting from an existing, not renovated and therefore not developed
construction - a building of period of promoterism in Sophienstrasse 18 - the intention of
the Buro 213 is to give the thoughts and ideas of the artist an adequate platform.
The challenge of trying hybrid and non-disciplinary working operations in the areas of
development and concept, lead in April of 1997 to the foundation of Buro 213. Since then,
the architectures Schell and Ziegler are working together with fine artists as with theorists,
software experts and graphic designers. The interest is focusing on locations offside, new
relations, coherence and interspaces which needing more attention.
In this context, the two unused towers of the stairways in the second yard of
Sophienstraⓒe 18 (Berlin Mitte, where both Pruss & Ochs Gallery and Buro 213 has their
location) were discovered as the starting point for the exhibition. The stairways, pointing
each other vice versa, offer an ideal structure for the bipolar ways of working,
characteristically for Ik-Joong Kang. They can be connected in different ways. The inside
of the staircases will be re-activated: the wall of the staircase will be used as an
exhibition area, the opposite banisters will form a continuous wall covered by a special
material reflecting the opposite exhibition space.
In the outward area, all floors of the both opposite staircases are being connected
through a scaffold. The visitors can move from one side to the other and pause there. The
structure is playing with the idea of traditional Asian architecture connecting in- and
outdoor areas. Not only the buildings of the neighborhood, also the sky is becoming part
of the project.
Ik-Joong Kang is replying to this platform with different works; new works, which he has
developed in the new areas created by the architectures and existing works like ?100 000
dreams¡°, which have been showed in the demilitarized zone between North- and South
Korea.
Integrated in the 'Bridge-Situation', a workroom for children will exist in a small shed in
the garden of the gallery. The project 'Amazed World' is to be initiated from here; the
arising drawings will be collected for a later installation.
BRIDGES - INTERSPACES - SKY
The unexploited towers of the staircases in the second court yard of the gallery were
rediscorved as a starting point for the row of exhibitions. The staircases offer an ideal
structual option for the
bipolar working ways of Ik-Joong Kang, who lets different worlds in his work - East Weast, North and South Korea - collide. The staircases are facing display surface. The
view onto the roof is also lined with a mirrored layer. The Two opposing staircases are
connected onto the outside with scaffolding. Vistors can move from one side to the other
on the scaffolding and linger on it. The structure plays with the idea of traditional Asian
architecture, connecting inner and outer spaces.
=============================================================
United Nations Secretariat news (November - December 2001)
"Amazed World"
By Val Castronovo
Amazed World is a towering showcase of miniature drawings from 34,000 children from
132 countries. Constructed by Korean artist Ik-Joong Kang, the monumental installation is
sponsored by the Republic of Korea and UNICEF and will be on view until May, when the
General Assembly will be holding its Special Session on Children.
Kang's three-tiered, multimedia oeuvre is a shock of primary colours, so-called
"danchung colors," which according to Korean belief symbolize harmony and the universe.
Tiny mirrors are interspersed throughout the mosaic, and windows are carved in the walls,
adding depth and dimension as you peer through them Alice in Wonderland-style.
The three towering, parallel walls, linked by silk-screened beams, are the artist's vision of
a global house. "The house holds three concepts of time - past, present and future,"
Kang told Secretariat News. "The danchung colors and the Korean concept of harmony
symbolize the past. Look at yourself in one of the mirrors, and you see the present. The
children and their drawings represent the future."
It took two dozen studio workers laboring for six months to assemble Amazed World. Each
child's drawing was mounted on one of the artist's signature, 3 inch x 3 inch wooden
blocks, "little windows looking into their dreams." Walls of pictures become walls of sound
as taped voices of the children sounding their visions of the future in a multitude of
languages play from speakers embedded in the beams.
The dense mix of sound, image
and color almost overwhelms, so grand is the scale and ambitious the plan. But what
seems big - gargantuan even - to the spectator seems small to Kang, who envisions
enlarging his installation to include participation "by a million or 10 million children."
In the short term, he hopes to add a fourth wall to the exhibit, dedicated to the victims of
11 September. It will incorporate thousands of children's drawings the artist has received
since the tragedy, each with its own healing power, he says.
In the long term Kang hopes to locate a permanent venue for his evolving work, which will
be a "monument to children's dreams that will grow like a tree."
Kang solicited the artwork in a letter that read: "Hello! What is your dream? I am very
curious about how you imagine your future, the future of our world… if you send your
dream I will use it like a brick, making a big bridge for people to cross over into the
future."
Special efforts were made to have artwork from children facing severe hardships,
including orphans in Croatia, refugees in Azerbaijan and slum children in Kenya. More
than 300 drawings came from Afghan children in refugee camps in Pakistan. The project
was an opportunity to let children speak for themselves, and all submissions were
accepted.
One picture from a young Mexican girl depicts a Palestinian child shaking hands with an
Israeli child. Another from a child in Cuba expresses the desire to become a doctor to
help heal children.
"Many people who visited the exhibit after the World Trade Centre bombing saw the irony,"
says Kang. "They saw the innocence of children who were trying to tell us to stop for a
moment and see their world - to believe in them, to believe in mankind. Why don't we
focus more on this?" he asks.
===============================================================
Amazed World Exhibition catalog, 2001
Amazed World
By Soon-Young Yoon
In December 1999, Ik-Joong Kang, a New York based Korean artist, worked with children
from South Korea to create “100,000” Dreams.” Thousands of children’s miniature
drawings styled in his signature 3 inch x 3-inch canvas were displayed inside a onekilometer vinyl tube in the wasteland of the South Korean demilitarized zone. At night, the
gigantic tube lit up like a fat glowworm, hoping to attract North Korean children on the
other side to come out and play.
By including children’s drawings from all around the world, “Amazed World” expands
upon the meaning of “10,000 Dreams.” The occasion is the United Nations Special
Session on Children, an event that brings together head of state or government, nongovernmental organizations, UN agencies and advocates of children’s rights. In the
visitors’ lobby of the United Nations in New York, nearly 34,000 children’s drawings from
over 125 countries are incorporated into Kang’s artistic installation. Displaying the primary
colors of the world’s flags, three parallel walls proudly hold the children’s drawings.
Overhead, the sterling silver Sputnik from Russia shines like a robot moon. Near a mural
on a back wall, a statue of Greek god hurls his lance across time. The installation
complements the setting. In Kang’s “Amazed World,” the past and future merge with
timeless hopes and dreams.
The two exhibit entrances allow the viewer to choose a course of travel. You can peer
through a window and imagine which drawings make up a spontaneous canvas. Overhead
are beams, reminiscent of a Korean temple silk-screened with the five scared colors of
the rainbow and the five directions of traditional Korean cosmology. You may want to start
at the shorter end of the ten-foot wall and work your way to the 18-foot high hallway, so
that you senses gradually adjust to the towering scale of the collection contained in this
unusual archive.
If you listen closely, you can hear the murmur of children’s voices from behind the
paintings talking to you and to each other. Kang speaks of these painting as if they were
children attending a virtual international festival. His letter to the children said: “Hello! I
would like to gather all of your dreams for the future and show them in one place so
everyone can see! What is your dream? I am very curious about how you imagine your
future, the future of our world. Do you dream from the mountains? Maybe you dream from
you home near the ocean, or desert, or city with tall buildings.” An Azerbaijan girl drew a
picture of her wish for a baby brother. Other drawings depict Ugandan children at school,
a Portuguese circus and its lion, a Nigerian doctor helping children, and a Sri Lankan
astronaut. The messages are likewise varied: “Fly in airplane and jump,” “World
Photographer,” “I love USA,” “Bahamas,” and “True Love Fashion magazine.” Kang
assembled these ima! ged randomly. It would be unthinkable for him to restrict their
freedom. He believes that respect and continual commitment are the two essential
expressions of love that these children deserve.
With children’s participation as its core message, “Amazed World” stimulated a global
response. The Muscogee Creek Nation Tobacco Prevention and Control Program
contributed drawings from Native American children. Drawings by disabled children and
orphans came from Croatia’s UN Permanent Mission and its Ministry of Social Welfare.
The National Guidance and Empowerment Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS in
Uganda as well as the Center for Human Environment in Ethiopia sent drawings that
reflected a world free of HIV/AIDS. There are drawings by refugees from Azerbaijan and
drawings by slum children who had never even painted before from GROOTS in Kenya.
One schoolteacher in Switzerland organized all her students to draw, and China is
planning a national competition for its young contributors.
As the dead line for submission approached, a girl from Ghana who had missed the date
wrote: “My mother is everything I have on this Earth. Just a month ago I lost my one and
only sister. Now, art is my life. The purpose of writing you is to plead you with you to give
me another chance because I was among those in the art competition.” She didn’t have
to ask; Kang accepted all drawing as if they were his own. As he put it, “We are all
connected. I am relieved that I am not alone. I am a part of these children, and they are a
part of me.” Kang did not want the project to become a global competition.
Paintings continue to pour into his studio. “Amazed World” is an evolving work, a distinct
maker in the changing vision of his art and the artist’s role. Gone are the themes of
cultural adaptation seen in earlier works like “8490 Days of Memory,” when his own life
was the rich text of his artistic diary. In this international series, Kang has stepped back
and put children’s own voices forward. Yet the role of the artist is not just as a curator; he
has his own dream to fulfill. As he explained to the children, “If you send your dream I will
use it like a brick making a big bridge for people to cross over into the future.” This
exhibit is another stop in journey across a bridge of hope, led by a humble pied piper
named Kang.
================================================================
Press Release, 2001
The Amazed World
By Ik-Joong Kang
"I have six sisters and want one brother", says a 12 years old Uzbekistan girl in her
drawing of herself pushing a little brother in a stroller. A boy from Congo made a beautiful
drawing with an inscription, " the way to survive in Africa - never see, never talk and never
hear". A young Switzerland student designed a beautiful house walking with its robot legs.
A 10-year-old Italian boy is making a wonderful over- head kick in a soccer field. One of
the first drawings received for our 'Amazed World' exhibition held at United Nation was
from a child in Cuba, whose dream is to become a doctor helping other children. This
drawing was later displayed next to the drawing by a 13-year-old Vietnamese friend who
invites us to his dinner party at his flower- blooming back yard. You can also find an
amazing drawing with an image of a Palestinian child and an Israeli child shaking hands,
done by a girl from Mexico.
The "Amazed World" received drawings from 34,000 children in over 135 countries. Each
child was given a 3"x3" canvas to draw their goals and dreams. With each 3"x3" that we
received, we saw in them a window of each child's world and heard voices of their cries
and joys. Some wanted to climb the highest mountain while a 12-year-old Uzbekistan girl
just wanted a brother. Each dream was mounted and exhibited next to another. When
34,000 finally filled the walls of the United Nations, we saw the harmony of it all. At a
simple glance, it was one world filled with one dream - harmoniously existing with the
other. But each canvas tells a story of its creator.
Ironically, on the day the "Amazed World" exhibition was to open was September 11, 2001
- the day of the World Trade Center bombing. Sadly, world peace craved by children who
participated in the show was shattered by the event. United Nations where the show was
being held was closed indefinitely and all the people evacuated. 34,000 paintings proudly
done by children all over the world hung in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. It wasn't
until many days later that the building was re-opened to the public. However, there was
still lingering the threat of biological warfare, more bomb threats, and possibility of more
plane crashes. There was a calm sea of panic everywhere. If a bus went off the road or a
plane crashed while taking off, people assumed it was the doing of our "enemy. As
people's panic rose, we all became patriotic and wanted revenge. Through these tragic
events, the voices of the 34,000 children became faint and almost lost. Many people who
visited the exhibition after the bombing saw the irony of it all. They saw the innocence of
children who were trying to tell us to stop for a moment and see their world - to believe in
them - to believe in the mankind. Fortunately, the people who were able to see the
exhibition amidst many layers of security check into the United Nations building, were
taken aback by these voices. The exhibition which was to close on October 29, 2001 was
extended until September of 2002. Perhaps the voices of these children can be heard if
the world allows them.
===============================================================
The Virginian Pilot -The Daily Break, January 27, 2000
Sweet Salute
By Teresa Annas
(Staff Writer)
Tribute arose out of artist's desire to freeze his memories of home.
MacArthur, in chocolate.
A well known artist has rendered Gen. Douglas MacArthur in creamy Korean chocolate.
At 9 feet, Ik-Joong Kang's statue might keep a pack of hungry children sugar-charged for
days. If they were allowed to gnaw in his shoes and slacks.
But the art installation, titled"8490 Days of Memory," is in a please-don't touch-or nibblegallery.
Tonight, Kang's 7-ton sculpture goes on view at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia
in Virginia Beach. It's part of a show called "Six Degrees of Inspiration," featuring work by
prominent immigrant artists.
Displayed so close to MacArthur's Norfolk memorial and burial site-and days after his
widow passed way-some might think Kang was daring to trivialize the popular, five-star
general. The truth is quite he opposite.
"MacArthur is probably most important man in Korean history. He was almost a Superman
too many people," Kang said, speaking last week from his home in Manhattan.
"Even during the demonstrations against American government in the 1970s, his statue as
unharmed by any demonstrator."
Kang didn't experience the Korean War. But growing up, the effects, the stories, were
vivid to him.
Most of his countrymen knew how MacArthur, in 15 days, had overtaken South Korea,
bullying Communist forces back across the 38th Parallel.
That was in 1950, a decade before Kang was born.
American and Korean cultures were well mixed in the town where Kang grew up-It'ae Won,
site of a U.S. Army base. It was unique among Korean town, in the extent to which
business catered to American; most signs were in both English and Korean.
The artist's family was not well off. Luxuries and treats were rare.
He recalls running after Jeeps packed with American soldiers tossing candy bars to
youths.
"The memory of the chocolate was very sweet." He said. "The memory of war was very
bitter."
Memory of an accident also left a sour taste.
He was chasing a Jeep with another boy when his friend was hit by a car. The youngster
was hurt, but not fatally. "Then I had to run and tell his mother. I remember his mother
screaming and crying. I remember really strongly."
He places that bittersweet contrast with other yin-yangs he's seen or read about.
"When I look back in my Korean history, even though MacArthur was a good man with a
good heart, I was comparing him with Christian missionaries. They came to our land with
rice in one hand, a bible in the other," Kang says.
"Then they five out candy to children, was I kind of public relations reason? May be not.
May be they gave chocolate from caring mind."
"It really didn't matter to me at the time. The chocolate was so sweet. I couldn't really eat
it all at once."
"When you open foil, you smell. You don't eat right away. You lick the chocolate with your
tongue, little by little. You eat slowly as possible."
"Very precious."
Kang moved to New York in 1984. He was 24, and came to pursue a master's degree n
art from Pratt institute in Brooklyn. While studying, he worked two jobs, leaving him no
studio time for making art.
His solution: During long subway rides from job to class to job. He created hundreds of
pocket-sized, multimedia paintings and drawings.
For a newcomer, it was a way to process the flood of strange sights. Every work was a
quick impression, and personal response.
By 1994, he was successful enough to quit his jobs and work full time at art. Yet he
continued to make many small pieces, and have those like-scales components comprise
his art installations.
Kang's career is going well. He's shown worldwide in prestigious venues, including two
shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, one with the MacArthur sculpture. He
represented Korea at the 1997 Venice Biennale, where he earned a major international
award.
In 1997, he also showed at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia. His "English Garden"
installation resembled a Buddhist temple covered in small paintings; tapes broadcast both
the chanting Korean monks and English language lessons.
As was " English Garden." The "8490" piece is about the artist's attempts to hold on to
memories.
Kang was in American for 12 years before he returned to Korea.
" I realized my memory about my hometown was gone. And my memory of my small
school."
He felt urgent about that loss of personal history.
"So I had to freeze, just freeze my memories. So it doesn't fade away."
On that trip, he connected with a gallery in Seoul and told them his idea. In 1995, the
Korean economy was booming, so the gallery handed Kang $250,000 to build his "8490
Days of Memory."
It remains his most expensive artwork.
Since MacArther is a close copy of a memorial in Incheon, near Seoul. Same height.
Same posture, with field glasses held down at his waist. In uniform, and a tad pudgy at
the middle.
Kang started his statue with a clay model. Then he cast it in plaster, resulting in a hollow
form that he pulled of in sections and rejoined.
He got about 44 pounds of Korean chocolate donated by a Korean company. Then he set
up a double boiler in his studio, melting the chocolate, then icing it on with a wide,
bamboo brush.
At time, to get in the tight spots-around the general's face, for instance-he's put in
rubber gloves and smear the hot chocolate on by hand. Ouch.
This is the fourth showing for "8490." Five years since it was made, the original chocolate
remains.
Kang has cut the statue in two, to make shipping easier.
Touch ups, however, are required with each new showing.
Kang generally installs his work. But he learned his other-in-law would be having openheart surgery in Monday, the day he was due in Virginia Beach. So he and his wife dashed
off to Korea.
Earlier this week, staff at the Beach arts center were doing as Kang would have done.
They were heating chocolate and brushing it on. At the very least, they had to heal the
seam between the two main sections.
May be an elbow or nose was scuffed. Needed a little fresh chocolate.
The figure now stands on 8,490 3-inch plastic cubes, each containing a tiny toy. Each
cube represents a day in his life in Korea, prior to moving to the United States.
His mother collected every one of those toys. "It's kind of her life also. Kind of root. So I
think it's important she collect, and we make together."
He's reclaiming each day from his childhood, and freezing it.
But the yin-yang two-sidedness also is encapsulated.
On that chocolate MacArthur:
"When you talk about Buddha, Buddha was covered in gold. When you go to any temple
in Asia, Buddha statue usually has gold coat."
The gold is a sacred material, symbolic of holiness. But in Korean history, wars were
fought to obtain gold.
"Chocolate-same thing. Sweet, and bitter."
==============================================================
Neueus aus Sammlung Ludwig, Exhibition Catalogue 1999
The Art of Ik-Joong Kang
by Eugenie Tsai,
(Senior Curator, Permanent Collection Whitney Museum of American Art)
Buddha Learning English (1999) resembles the interior of a small pavilion of the sort we
might see nestled amidst distant hills in a traditional Asian landscape painting. A curved
wall covered from top-to-bottom with 3060 jewel-toned paintings, all measuring threeby-three inches, encloses a chocolate statue of a seated Buddha. The statue rotates
slowly on its base, accompanied by the repetitious sound of chanting. This figure of
Buddha is modeled on Seated Maitreya, a Korean National Treasure from the sixth century,
which Kang admired in the inaugural exhibition of the Korean Galleries at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, in 1998. Working from a postcard showing the front of the
statue, and a drawing he made of the back, he recreated the masterpiece in resin, and
added the finishing touch of a layer of melted milk chocolate.
In contrast to the serene, contemplative attitude of the statue, the paintings project a loud,
boisterous presence. Each canvas bears a different phrase (for example, "garden clogs",
"city taxi", "erotic context") randomly selected by Kang from his daily reading of The New
York Times and other newspapers and magazines. The artist's treatment of individual
letters and larger phrases-outlining words in black, employing blocky capital letters,
dividing words at odd junctures-highlight the abstract, graphic qualities of language in
ways that parallel strategies found in concrete poetry. While whole-heartedly embracing
American culture, the word paintings also refer to a Korean artistic tradition. The
unmodulated, highly saturated hues of red, green bright yellow, gold, white, and blue, and
the use of black outlines, are Kang's play on Don Cheong, a painting technique and color
scheme found at temples, such as Bulkuk-sa, an eighth century temple in Kyongju,
designated a National Treasure.
Buddha Learning English, incorporates themes and structures utilized in Kang's work
since he arrived in New York in 1984, where he came to attend graduate school at Pratt
Institute. As an impoverished student, he worked two jobs, one by day, and one by night.
This left him little time to spend in the studio. He discovered that three-by-three inch
canvases fit into his pockets and into the palm of his hand, allowing him to work on them
during his long commute between his jobs and school. The subway became a mobile
studio. The paintings produced by Kang at this time were immediate and diaristic,
recording his amazement and wonder at everyday encounters with a foreign culture. Hung
in a grid formation, several thousand at a time, the ensemble of canvases presents a
continuum of Kang's life in a newly adopted culture.
A few years later, other aspects of Kang's production drew upon his memories of Korea,
particularly of school trips to Buddhist temples. An earlier series entitled Buddha Learning
English (1992-92) juxtaposed a grid of three-inch-square paintings, each bearing an
iconic image of a seated Buddha, with the artist's voice on tape, carefully enunciating
phrases in English.
Kang's fascination and struggle with the English language is also evident in several series
of drawings (1992) devoted primarily to the written word as image. These include
drawings on gridded white paper with vocabulary words taken from the study guide for the
Graduate Record Examination written in English using red ink, and the Korean equivalent
written in blue. In other series, the artist filled sheets of lines paper with a single phrase,
like "good luck," "happy," scrawled longhand until no empty space remained.
With his installation 8490 Days of Memory (1996), Kang once again revisited his childhood.
He utilized chocolate, with its distinctive aroma and taste as a material to evoke his initial
encounter with American culture during the Korean War. During this time of great
impoverishment, he and his friends would stand near a gate of a US Army base near his
school where Gis would throw candy bars to Korean children. A nine-foot chocolate
statue of General Douglas MacArthur dominated the installation. Eight-thousand-fourhundred-ninety three-inch squares of chocolate, hung on the wall, each bearing a different
insignia from the U. S. army.
As we have seen, Kang's past work has reveled in the most mundane aspects of the
material world, exemplified by American popular culture, including the printed word. With
Buddha Learning English, we see a reevaluation of the artist's attitude toward this world.
The downcast gaze and contemplative pose of the seated Buddha, slowly revolving in a
cacophonous world of minutiae suggests a letting go, a release of all attachment to the
everyday world of appearance and things. Having examined his past and relished the
present, perhaps on the eve of the Millenium, Kang is looking toward the future.
==============================================================
Art Asia Pacific, Number 19, 1998
LIVING ON THE EDGE
Borders and cultures in the work of Ik-Joong Kang
By Joan Kee
Sporting round glasses to match his round, wide-eyed face, Ik-Joong Kang looks less
like a tortured artist than he does an 'accountant' (as he describes himself), or perhaps a
deceptively mild-mannered bureaucrat. Beneath the misleading demeanour, however, is
an artist most adept at exploring cultures and exploding boundaries. At times flamboyant,
poignant and jocular, the small 3 x 3 inch (7.6 x 7.6 centimetre) canvases that form the
basis of Kang's work have a simplicity that transcends the usual diet of angst so
prominent in the work of many Asian-American artists. Unlike many of his more solemn
and sometimes dour Korean counterparts, Kang has a playful style and exhaustive
repertoire of materials that traverse and amalgamate different cultures. For Kang, the
fascinating aspect of culture is its potential to embrace other cultures, and in his works
from 1988 to 1997 his exploration of a multitude of ethnic and local cultures redefines
boundaries that once limited definitions of 'culture'.
Ik-Joong Kang has always had an affinity with the idea of borders. Rather than defining
the border as a hostile obstacle or point of tension a la the DMZ (the demilitarised zone
dividing North and South Korea), Kang perceives it as a place to absorb and digest the
cultures of both sides. Growing up near Seoul's Itaewon, a neighbourhood of Korean
souvenir shops, seedy bars and restaurants catering to the tourist trade near the United
States army base, the artist quickly assimilated and digested this border culture. Although
Itaewon was and is considered by many Koreans to be a cultural no-man's-land, Kang
was intrigued by the coalescence of American culture with the huckster attitude of the
Korean shopkeepers. Today, Kang's own studio is located on the periphery of Chinatown
in New York and his early works, such as One Month Living Performance, 1986, and 6000
Paintings, an installation that featured in the 'Broadway Windows' exhibition in 1988,
showcase Kang's fascination and struggle with American culture.
Leaving what he considered a stifling training in academic drawing at the well-regarded
Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Kang emigrated to the United States in 1987. In New York
City he began his series of small works on canvas as he commuted from Brooklyn's Pratt
Institute to his part-time job at a flea market in Far Rockaway, Queens. This commute was
in itself another passage between seemingly disparate realms: the 'high' art taught by the
fine arts program at Pratt and the 'low' kitsch of the flea market. His choice of the 3 x 3
inch format reflects his merging of the two realms: on one hand, the size is the standard
of perfection in Zen thought and is found in shoji screens and traditional wooden sake
containers,1) and on the other hand, as Kang readily notes, the dimensions are equivalent
to the distance between the eyes, a size that would 'appeal to the public who, after all,
must be able to comprehend and enjoy what they are seeing'. The exquisite melds with
the ordinary.
But Kang's most lissom merging is his penetration of 'low' or common culture into the
rarefied sanctuary of galleries and museums, such as branches of the Whitney Museum of
American Art. Kang often compares his own work to the Korean dish of 'bibimbap', a
hodgepodge of vegetables and meats mixed with rice that is an everyday meal found on
any street corner in Korea. Banal items like rubber stamps and plastic magnets are
prominently placed in many of Kang's canvases. Despite the fact that many of his earlier
works were produced from the perspective of the newly arrived immigrant, it is evident in
his later work that Kang is a first-generation Korean-American and a voracious consumer
of all cultures.
Sound Paintings, an installation at Montclair State College in New Jersey in 1990, revels in
the ordinary. Among its 7000 canvases, viewers can find everything from a romping, Keith
Haring-like tiger to the ubiquitous New York City subway advertisement for parenthood
counselling that reads, 'Pregnant? We Can Help'. Inspired by a 'singing' Christmas card 2),
Kang installed tiny microchips emanating various city sounds in 2000 of the wooden
blocks in the installation. Combined with the pinks, blues and yellows of the paintings, the
sound from the canvases approximates a slice of life in New York City. This impression is
reinforced by the severe alignment of the canvases into orderly rows, paralleling the
perpendicular streets and avenues of Manhattan. By virtue of the installation's sheer size
and the range of questions that the artist asks himself in each canvas, Kang compels the
viewer to share his wonder of New York, his 'New World'.
The peregrine Kang crosses even more boundaries in Throw Everything Together and Add,
a 1994 installation at San Francisco's Capp Street Project. He illustrates his concurrent
intimacy with Korea and the United States in works that juxtapose drawings of gunboats
reminiscent of the Korean War with flimsy sailboats alluding to the amusing plight of the
stranded inhabitants of 'Gilligan's Island' - a popular American sitcom of the 1970s. On a
more local level, the work details Kang's meandering through the very distinctive and
disparate neighbourhoods of Manhattan: his references to museum fixtures such as
conceptual artist Joseph Beuys and Kang's hero, Nam June Paik, signify the art
establishment located in the Upper East Side and SoHo, while spools of thread and tiny
decorative tassels are a miniature facsimile of the textile-related objects and other brica-brac sold on Canal Street, at the boundary between SoHo and Chinatown. Far from
appearing as contrasting symbols of irreconcilably different worlds, however, Throw
Everything Together and Add deftly blends these elements into a cultural buffet at which
any viewer can easily discover familiar icons and items.
Not content merely to wander, however, Kang's 'English' series demonstrates his
ceaseless attempts to cultivate a knowledge of American culture. Like a hardworking
Korean student preparing for his entrance examinations, in his 1994 installation English
Learning Drawing Kang studies English vocabulary taken from the graduate record
examination. The densely written words and their corresponding Korean translation
resemble flashcards or noryukjang.3) These sheets later formed the basis of English Rice
Field, 1996, a personification of Kang's effort to plant and cultivate knowledge. Neatly
mapped out on the ground in long strips similar to the paddy fields found throughout rural
Korea, the tiny words resemble seeds that the artist has sown. This is a three-dimensional
rice field, however, as the process of cultivation and planting takes place on two adjoining
walls. Carved in woodblocks and stamped onto reams of paper, more English words in
various primary colours adorn the walls and are reminiscent of the thirteenth-century
Tripitaka Koreana, the oldest and most complete set of Buddhist scriptures, which are
carved into 31,137 woodblocks.4) Kang accordingly intertwines references to traditional
Korea with his fervent and current study of English.
Yet not all of Kang's travails celebrate all cultures or all attitudes towards a given culture.
He frequently uses popular iconography such as chocolate as a means of satirising stale
hierarchies and undiscerning attitudes. 8490 Days of Memory, 1996, is Kang's humorous
perception of a once-powerful American coloniser, invoked through memories of his
childhood in an impoverished, war-torn Korea of the early 1960s. The work is a colossal
effort depicting a gargantuan, almost three-metre high chocolate statue of General
Douglas MacArthur. At MacArthur's feet are 8940 clear plastic cubes containing small
tokens of Korean childhood, such as a pencil-shaped eraser and a pair of doll's shoes.
The title of the work refers to the number of days Kang spent in Korea before coming to
the United States.
Kang equates chocolate with the sweet promise of the American dream that beckoned
poverty-stricken Koreans in the 1960s and 1970s. An almost non-existent luxury in Korea,
chocolate was tossed by American soldiers to Korean children. It symbolises the
sweetness of American plenty while its silver foil wrapping is a literal representation of the
glittering promise of wealth and the American dream. Kang drives this point home by
incorporating a large statue of MacArthur, who gained a place in Korean hearts by
masterminding the Inchon landing, a crucial turning-point in the Korean War.5) Kang's
inflated statue of MacArthur is reminiscent of Andy Warhol's blown-up silkscreen images
of larger-than-life celebrities such as Mao Zedong and Marilyn Monroe.
For Kang, chocolate is a metaphor saturated with allusions. It is a positive metaphor in the
sense that it 'represents the wealth of the Americans, which eventually enabled South
Korea to climb from its dirt-poor, war-torn aftermath in the 1950s'. However, Kang also
uses chocolate to portray the United States as an appropriator or coloniser. Kang states
that the choice of chocolate in 8490 Days of Memory 'was especially relevant for this
project given the fact that chocolate has been appropriated by so many countries that
claim it as its own when, in fact, it originally hails from Mexico'. In Kang's work chocolate
symbolises the often deleterious relationship between Korea and the United States, as the
chocolate 'may taste sweet, but when eaten over a period of time, results in a range of
health problems like tooth decay'. The suffocating prevalence of chocolate in 8490 Days
of Memory denotes the wholesale acceptance of the culture of the United States by
Koreans and the resulting decay of traditional Korean culture as it is displaced by slavish
imitation of western trends. The metaphor of chocolate is a double entendre in this work:
when exposed to heat it rapidly melts, paralleling Kang's perception of the United States'
waning military power in both Korea and the world. By creating a giant statue of MacArthur
in chocolate, a perishable medium, Kang undermines the construct of an omnipotent
United States.
Kang wants viewers to embrace different cultures. Says the artist, 'Learning is a two-way
street and in the twenty-first century, we need to give and receive'.6) Awarded a citation
for special merit at the 1997 Venice Biennale, Kang's 'Learning' series reflects his ideal of
reciprocity between artist and audience. In I Have to Learn Chinese, 1997, the title's
imperative tone urges the viewer to join the artist in memorising its cloisonne-like strips of
Chinese characters. Comprised of ninety poplar panels, the elongated rectangular forms
epitomise Kang's desire to 'grow into a big tree that does not fall'.7) The panels join
together to form a trunk with roots deeply embedded in the past, a past that: 'both the
individual and the nation should know about. People talk about globalisation, but in order
to accomplish that we have to really plunge ourselves into the past. It's sort of like trying
to jump when you're in a swimming pool - you can't really jump unless you push yourself
from the pool bottom.' Throughout the 'Learning' series, Kang notes that 'people are
uncertain about the future and restless when it comes to the past'. The purpose of his
work, then, is 'to eliminate both that uncertainty and restlessness'.
In America Landing, Kang's 1997 installation at the Kwangju Biennale, the coloniser and
colonised become equals. Posing a statue of General MacArthur at one end of a thirteenmetre long corridor, Kang subverted the statue's imposing manner by using perspective to
diminish its virtual size. Viewer and subject observe each other on an equal basis with no
pretence of superiority on either side. There is no 'superior' culture, Kang suggests, only
different ones.
At the same time, however, Kang insists on the two-way street where Koreans must share
their culture with others. 'Flexibility', says Kang, 'has enabled Koreans to survive even
amidst the harshest of foreign invasions and has been the source of my own strength'.8)
In Kang's work, flexibility is denoted by the artist's facility to traverse and absorb other
cultures while maintaining and disseminating his own. Although Kang is classified as an
American artist in exhibitions such as 'American Story' at the Setagaya Art Gallery in Tokyo
in 1997, solo exhibitions in Seoul, and at international festivals such as the Venice and
Kwangju biennales, he is often instantly made a representative of Korea. Yet through his
work, Kang embodies the notion of fluidity and, in turn, successfully defies the viscosity
of categories and hierarchies that wilfully attempt to constrain the whirl and flux of culture
of his infinite and soothingly repetitive squares.
Footnotes
1) Eugenie Tsai, 'Good and Plenty', Ik-Joong Kang, exhibition catalogue, Art Space,
Seoul, 1996.
2) Artist's statement, 2 January 1991.
3) Literally, 'book of effort'. This is a colloquialism that refers to blank books used by
Korean schoolchildren to commit words or phrases to memory by writing them over and
over again.
4) Peter Hyun, Koreana, Korea Britannica, Seoul, 1984, p. 110.
5) The Inchon landing resulted in the retreat of the North Korean People's Army north of
the thirty-eighth parallel (the current boundary dividing Korea). On 15 September 1950
United States troops landed at Inchon, almost fifty kilometres from Seoul, behind enemy
lines. This move sandwiched a sizeable percentage of the North Korean army and
reversed the tide of the war. See David J. Wright, Historical Dictionary of the Korean War,
James I. Matray (ed.), Greenwood Press, Westport, 1991, p. 189.
6) Quoted in the Chosun Ilbo, 23 June 1997, p. 10.
7) ibid.
8) ibid.
Research for this article was made possible by the generous support of an East Asia
travel grant from Yale University. If not specified otherwise, all quotes and background
information are from interviews with the artist on 7 February 1997 in New York City and 22
August 1997 in Seoul, Korea. Images courtesy the artist. Joan Kee received her training in
art history at Yale University and writes frequently on contemporary Asian and AsianAmerican art.
==============================================================
The Virginian Pilot The Daily Break, Saturday, December 13, 1997
Worldly Visions
By Teresa Annas
Korean-American artist Ik-Joong Kang is Metaphor Man. One minute, Kang sees himself
as bibimbap, a rice-based Korean dish. The next, he is a fortune cookie.
Then he's a kite, his whimsical spirit soaring out and filling as airy gallery in the
Contemporary Art Center of Virginia Beech, where earlier this week he was installing a new
piece for a show called "Objectivity: International Objects of Subjectivity."
Kang's "English Garden," a 7-foot-tall Buddhist temple with a skin of 350 tape players
and 300 tiny paintings, is among the 51 artworks that went on view there Friday.
"Objectivity" is the first original show curated by the center's new officials-executive
director Barbara J. Bloemink and curator Carla Hanzal, both of whom have strong credits
regarding international contemporary art. It features a dozen sculptors of international
stature, nearly all of whom are making their regional debut.
The premise of the show is that no art is truly objective. That, in fact, all art is subjective,
in that it reflects the personal life of the artist and his or her cultural context.
Most of the artists are from other countries but live in the United States. The exceptions
are Kcho, who cannot get a visa to leave his native Cuba, and Kate Beynon, a ChineseAustralian artist who lives in Australia.
Kcho crafts poignant sculptural installations, incorporating inner tubes and oars, about his
fellow Cubans' risky attempts to float away from oppression and poverty.
Beynon challenges the traditions of the Chinese half of her heritage-in particular, the
ways Chinese women have been demeaned. Piles of soft-sculpture, distorted bound feet
show up in her work.
Also featured is French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who lives in New York. In her late 80's,
she is among the hottest, most influential artists working today. Her work is dark and
psychologically penetrating; here she is represented by a menacing 6 foot-diameter
bronze spider that is the stuff of nightmares. Brace for screams as visitors round the bend
and spy it on the wall.
And there is one area native-Norfolk-reared Walter Martin, now of New York, who creates
enigmatic, finely crafted objects that make literary references. He is the only artists in the
bunch who has shown locally, having been given a 1993solo show at the Chrysler
Museum of Art. Here, he collaborates with his companion, Spanish artisst Paloma Munoz.
The works were still being uncrated and installed as Kang comp;eted his " English
Garden." He sppoke as he contemp;ated piles of tape players and a box full of 3-by-3inch paintings trucked here from his Chinatown studio.
"I think art is about storytelling, about personal storytelling," said Kang who, at 37, already
has won a Special Merit Award (at the 1997 Venice Biennale) and has had two shows at
the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, including one with famed in Korean
video artist Nam June Paik.
And if art is a story, he said, "I am the ending, and the beginning."
Kang-rhymes with wan-was raised in Seoul, Korea, and pursue a master's degree in art
and an art career. During his first three years in the United Stated, he studied at Pratt
Institute in Brooklyn while working two jobs, which left him no time for making art. During
the long created hundreds of pocket-size paintings.
For a newcomer, it was a way to process the flood of strange sights he encountered. "My
paintings were like taking snapshots," he said.
Even after his career took off and he quit the jobs, he continued to paint small. It became
his trademark.
By now, he's made 50,000 3-inch-square paintings and wood blocks. The Whitney owns
6,000. Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art possesses 8,000.
"Instead of confronting a big canvas, I kind of put it in my palm. I don't really have to have
a huge idea," he said. " Small idea, put on canvas. It kind of flows, like a stream. It's not
like digesting everything. A million ideas, maybe not my ideas. I can just borrow for a
moment, chew it and spit it out."
The subject of his art since his arrival in the United States is "learning new culture, new
language. It's my personal story of immigrating to a new land."
He sees himself as bibibap, he said, because the dish remains the same, as long as rice
is its base. To him, the tiny, square, tile-like modules-sometimes paintings, sometimes
blocks of chocolate-are the rice for his bibibap, he said.
Also, he said, "my art is like a fortune cookie. My Chinese friends think this is an American
cookies. My American friends think this is Chinese coolie."
"Actually, fortune cookie is from San Francisco" he said, laughing hard at the punch line.
The fortune cookie, like his artwork, is a bridge between two cultures, while belonging
wholly to neither one.
Kang's art process is to " bring something from the outskirts of my memory, bring it
forward. And then bring something from my fantasy of the future, and then bring it over.
And let them collide, head-on crash. And something drops onto canvas."
With "English Garden," the past he brings forward is in the form of temple. Though raised
in a Christian family, temples and other manifestations of Buddhism were ever present in
his It'ae Won district.
"It's kind of old memory, something frozen. I'm trying to revive it, running something
electric through it," he said.
Kang was in the process of connecting each of the tape players that covered the temple.
That way, each would broadcast one of two tapes will play a recording of Korean
Buddhist monks chanting. A second tape, the will air English-language tapes, the sort
Kang listened to for many months after his arrival.
"It's like my brain," he said, holding his hands up high, then wriggling them down an
imagined figure. So, "English Garden" is a portrait of Kang-his bipolar brain sending dual
signals through his body.
Since Kang has grown accustomed to his new home, and less agog, he looks ore inward
than out. " Now, art is a journey of the imagination," he said. "Just fly. My task is
exploration."
"I see myself as a kite. As wind blows, I have to make myself lighter and maintain balance.
I slowly lift myself up, just let myself totally depend on this wind. Just go with the wind."
When Bloemink started her job at the art center in March, exhibits were scheduled through
early December. After that, a gaping hole.
"I wanted to develop a series of shows that, by their subject, taught people what to do
with contemporary art," said Bloemink, who has written about and curated shows on
contemporary art on a national and international level for 15 years. "That's what this one is
a first to do for us here."
The exhibit "Objectivity" begs for visitor participation.
"No objects that you choose to surround yourself with are objective. They all reveal
something about you," Bloemink said. "By building a show that asks people to think about
the meanings these object brings to mind. And imagining what it reflects about things
going on in these countries."
Hanzal, who began as curator July 19, picked up where Bloemink left off, adding more
artists to Bloemink's preliminary list. Pulling together such an ambitious show in only four
months, borrowing from a wide range of private collectors, top galleries and the artists
themselves, was a herculean effort few museums would attempt.
Before coming here, however, Hanzal had worked for seven years at the International
Sculpture Center in Washington, D.C., where she was exhibitions director, curator and
deputy director. She was accustomed to interacting with the world art community and had
widespread contracts within it. Yet, mostly she had been taking American art, including
two shows featuring modernist sculptor David Smith, to museums and galleries abroad.
Still, certain objects proved tough to come by. Bloemink really wanted to include one of
Bourgeois' celebrated spiders, and Hanzal felt just as strongly.
"That was major research," she said. Hanzal had seen Bourgeois' work in a D.C. gallery,
which in turn referred her also said they couldn't help her.
The Robert Miller Gallery in New York was touring a show of her spider pieces. Then,
Hanzal found a new gallery in New York's Chelsea neighborhood that out from a London
gallery in October and Hanzal nabbed it for the center.
"I don't like to take no for an answer," she said.
==========================================================
ART NEWS, March 1997
In the Palm of His Hand
By Carol Lutfy
Ik-Joong Kang believes that like bibibap, a Korean vegetable and rice dish, his art
improves with each new element. As if to prove it, he has created over 50,000 works-
three-by-three-inch drawings, paintings, woodcuts, and ceramic tiles-since 1984. " My
motto," says the 36-year-old Korean-born artist, "is to throw everything together and
add."
Kang's is a story of an artist who came to the United States, worked hard, and made good.
And from the look of things, 1996 was a banner year. In June, the Los Angeles Museum of
Contemporary Art bought 8,000 of his diminutive woodcuts. Over the Summer, the
Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris in New York hosted 8.490 Ddays of
Memory, his site-specific installation made of chocolate. Kang is also at work on a
mammoth 12-by-98-foot installation for the international terminal of the San Francisco
International Airport, as well as on a subway mural for the New York City Transit Authority.
In his homeland, too., recognition is steadily growing: He was recently selected as one of
two artists who will represent Korea at the Venice Biennale this year.
Since moving from Seoul to New York 13 years ago, Kang has reinvented himself as a
philosopher-artist in the spirit of his hero and compatriot Nam June Paik. His experience
as an immigrant to the United States forms the basis not only for his work but also for the
folksy parables and metaphors in which he speaks: America as the unattainable major
leagues; art as spaghetti or bibibap; cultural assimilation as the transformation of an
octagon into a circle.
The impetus behind his three-by-three-inch format is also a part of this mythology in the
palm of his hand when he was still a struggling art student. During his long subway
commutes between school and his jobs at a Korean grocery and a Queens flea market, he
recorded his unfamiliar surroundings, making pictures of tokens and teacups, faces and
fir trees, body builders and buildings. " The paintings were a tool for keeping my memory
fresh. I thought that if I could just store the images like documents, I could repaint them at
a later date," Kang recalls.
Somewhere along the way, however, he realized that his stockpile of canvases constituted
works in their own right. And indeed, the paintings are remarkable for their sincerity,
conspicuous absence of self-consciousness, and sheer diversity and volume. In some,
Kang employs found objects, like buttons, hardware, rubber stamps, tassels, and wooden
pegs. In others, he depicts himself as a forlorn, cartoonlike subject. Some are intricate
studies, other doodles. "They are a diary of my transition between two cultures," he
explains.
Kang's work has evolved consistently since he began working in miniature as a student.
He did his first "painting performance" at Two Two Raw Gallery in New York in 1990,
painting 1,000 canvases in a month. In 1990 he introduced the ides of sound to his
paintings by embedding tiny speakers in their backs. He initiated a series of woodcuts in
1991, which, like the paintings, echo the ephemera of everyday life. Then in 1992 his
interest shifted to "English learning drawings"-over 1,000 laminated pages crammed with
comic poignancy his painstaking efforts to master a second tongue.
More recently, the subject matter of his work has reached back to his childhood. For
example, 8,490Days of Memory evoked bittersweet memories with a nine-foot-tall,
chocolate-coated sculpture of General Douglas MacArthur. Lining foil-covered walls were
8,490 three-three-inch squares of chocolate(one for every day he lived in Korea), each
depicting a rank emblem of a U.S. army officer. For Kang, chocolate conjures up fond
memories of a child's treat as much as resentment toward the U.S. army bases in Korea.
The sickly sweet smell of the installation pointedly conveyed the duality of these feelings.
Despite advances in his career, Kang has kept his distance from the art world. A roundfaced, bespectacled man, he is by his own account "an artist who looks like an
accountant." He currently has no gallery and says he doesn't want one. "I want to make
what I want to make," he says. "It's too early for selling."
His modesty is perhaps tied to his respect for Nam June Paik and to his realization to
follow. "In 12th-century Korea, there was an army general who planted a sa=mall corn
stalk and jumped over it every day. In that way, even when it grew to be eight feet tall, he
could still jump over it," Kang says.
"Nam June is like the corn plant. People cannot jump over him right now. But I am two
feet tall, so they can jump over me. That's my role: to enable the next generation of
Korean artists to jump over him."
===============================================================
Exhibition Catalogue, 1997
Venice Biennale
By Kwang-su Oh
(Commissioner of Korean Pavilion)
Korea has participated in the Venice Biennale since 1996, but this year marks the second
time since the construction of its own national pavilion. Since the 1960, contemporary
Korean art has been introduced to the world through various routes, but it was only in very
recent times that participation in the Venice Biennale has come about, offering another
route through the international audience may experience the unique characteristics of
Korea's contemporary art.
For this Biennale, two young artist, ik-joong in painting and Hyung-woo Lee in sculpture,
have been selected. These two artists are still in their thirties and forties, and this ids the
first time that Korean artist of such a young generation are taking part in this international
exhibition. But despite their relatively youthful careers, each of these artists has a definite
aesthetic language and realm of his own. In some ways, they are noteworthy more for
their abundant potential than their experiences and achievements thus far. We are at this
point when we are devoting a great deal of concern toward what is being shaped in the
present and what is to be achieved in the future, no less than toward what we have
accomplished in the past. And in this effort, we can foresee the bright prospect of
contemporary Korean art. Such future possibilities figure into the expectations we have of
these two young artists.
In addition to the fact that one works in painting and the other in sculpture, these two
artists also reveal differences in their distinctly individual methods o visual expression,.
But even amid such disparities, their works somehow manage together to achieve an
uncanny accord, converging towards harmonious unity. While bringing together distinctive
visual languages, we did not over look the importance of Korean pavilion as a whole. We
were especially conscious of this point, considering the particular structure of the Venice
Biennale, which is composed of exhibitions presented in national pavilions. Our intention
was to organize an exhibition in which each artist would be able to display his own
singular aesthetic realm that would also be subsumed into a larger, harmonious whole.
After receiving an art education in Korea, Ik-joong Kang and Hyung-woo Lee went on to
further training in New York and Paris, respectively. Kang eventually settled in New York,
while Lee returned to Korea after a period of study in Rome and Paris. Lee actively
continues to produce and show his work, in addition to teaching at his alma mater in
Seoul.
Kang,'s uniquely structured work is from his daily life, and accordingly the content of his
work often calls to mind a personal diary or journal. During his early years in New York,
Kang spent up to twelve hours a day working in grocery stores or doing other odd jobs,
and his distinctive pictures were produced in spare moments a she rode the subway to
work. The necessity of having to work on the subway meant that he had to create
canvases small enough to hold in his palm or slip into his pocket. Thus, the various
phenomena of his daily life are recorded in scenes measuring only three-inches square:
events taking place around him, passing cityscapes, and his memory and desire revealed
in fragmented images, scrawls or epigrams. There are even flickering glimpses of scenes
condtitute the accumulation of all that kang saw, heard and felt-in short, a direct
reflection of his life-during his twelve years in New York. Kang has since gone to expand
the scope of his art, wandering all over New York in search of images.
The images in Kang's miniature scenes seem unfettered by any systematic order, rule or
motive. His reactions, observations and curiosity toward his subjects, along with the
imaginative associations they give rise to, come together-seemingly almost
indiscriminately-in the form of allusive pictures or cartoon-like images and caricatures.
But these diverse, individual objects are arranged to form a grid on the wall, where they
constitute a greater whole. Each discrete module is transformed into a component in a
large-scale mural. The appeal of Kang's work lies in its ability to provoke visual pleasure
and wonder through the connection and arrangement of the fragmented images that are
themselves filled with wit and humor.
Kang often compare his work to Bibimbap, a Korean dish which combines all kinds of
vegetables and meat mixed into a bowl of white rice and flavored, finally, with red pepper
paste and sesame seed oil. Korean dinner is usually centered around rice and soup with
an arrangement of side dishes, often some sort of meat or fish and small servings of
various vegetables. But in Bibimbap, through served in a single bowl, encompasses a
variety of foods high in calories.
The reason Kang compares his work to that peculiarly Korean dish called Bibimbap is that
the various discrete attributes of his work intermingle-and even the unfamiliar and the
ambiguous blend together-to compose a panorama on the single large surface of a wall.
In addition to the visually exuberant effect of his wall structure, another compelling aspect
of his work is the incorporation of sounds, the synthesis of visual and auditory elements.
In particular, the Western music that emanates from his work composed of numerous
Buddha images induces the spiritual shock of an unexpected encounter. In some of
Kang's work, we find elements of cultural criticism that is hard to overlook. Such elements
can be seen as a natural reflection of the critical spirit that he must have acquired when
he found himself cast into the foreign territory of New York after growing up in Korea.
While the works of both Ik-joong Kang and Hyung-woo Lee stand at points of departure
from painting and sculpture, they also include a sense of restoration, of a continual return
to painting and sculpture. In other words, the departure itself begins in questions about
the source and the essence. Needless to say, those questions are none other than "what
is sculpture?" To draw on a tiny surface or to make very spare structural forms is to
meditate on the original modes of drawing and making. And it is this aspect of their art
that will elicit the astonishing experience of glimpsing an original moment of pure creation.
Despite their universal aesthetic appeal, the works of these two artists also reflect
traditional Korean aesthetic sensibilities. Although derived from his recent years in New
York, Kang's fragmented images and signs-to say nothing of the repetition of Buddha
figures-also evoke elements of Minhwa, or folk painting, and Bujok, the talismanic
inscriptions common in folk religions. His scenes are permeated, perhaps without his
conscious awareness, with all maner of images and symbols prevalent in the spaces and
surroundings of Korean life. Hyung-woo Lee's small wood and terra cotta objects also
evoke household goods and utensils commonly found in traditional Korean living spaces.
In his work, we have the strong impression of coming upon an arrangement of broken
pieces of their works isn't international, for these artists insistently try not to invoke, or
reflect any kind of obsession with, the traditional. It is probably an embodiment of their
individual aesthetic sensibilities emerging naturally amid a long transcendent process.
==========================================================
The Earth Time, November 16-30, 1996
Let them eat chocolate
by Soon Young Yoon
General MacArthur's statue in the Whitney Museum stood near eight feet tall; his knuckles
rested confidently on his hips. His eyes looked sharp as if he were inspection you, instead
of you gazing at him.
The greater than life size was a reminder that this man had once wielded uncommon
power. With a wave of a hand, he decided the fate of thousands of American soldiers and
millions of Korean during the Korean War.
Memories of the American soldiers who served under him hung on the walls-hundreds of
small, rectangle blocks showing the stripes from uniform badges. Added a mood of
solemn silence. Yes, too many soldiers died in the "forgotten" war. This artistic memorial
to the Korean War was long overdue.
But what was this sweet pungent smell? I looked closer at the general's elbow. Yes.
Confirmed. This smell was coming from his cuff, his jacket and he walls. It was the brown
stuff of children's dreams and Christmas cheer.
It was none other than the wonderful smell of dark chocolate. For many Korean children
who were starving during the war, it was also the scent of America.
The brilliant artist, Ik joong Kang, justified his reason for choosing chocolate as the
material for his monument. As he explains it, some of his clearest childhood memories
were of good-willed American soldiers throwing chocolate bars to children.
The soldiers shared some of the most exotic goods imaginable. The children's favorite
was gum because it's flavor lasted forever; candy went down quicker. Many children
hoarded gum and candy wrappers for weeks, smelling them over and over again to relive
that satisfying moment.
It's ironic that candy and gum should be the enduring memories of starvation. But, indeed,
when one is very hungry, the first taste of anything is wonderful and unforgettable. Taste
is a conduit back to childhood memories. Sadly, for today' children in war-torn countries
like Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda these memories may best be forgotten.
According to the United Nations Children's fund, in 1995, there were 30 major armed
conflicts raging around the world. In the past decade, nearly two million children have
been killed in wars-many of these died of diseases related to malnutrition and lack of safe
water and sanitation. Their own armies have sold international relief goods for arms. The
children have waited for food aid that never arrived because of embargoes.
At the forthcoming the meeting in Rome of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture
Organization more than 120 Heads of State and Government are expected to recommit
themselves to global food security. One of the five "commitments" in the World Food
Summit Plan of Action deals with victims of civil conflicts.
It states: "we will endeavor to prevent and be prepared for natural disasters and manmade emergencies and to meet transitory and emergency food requirements in ways that
encourage recovery, rehabilitation, development and a capacity to satisfy future need.
There are two ideas to note here. First, the document acknowledges that reducing military
spending and promoting peace are as important as emergencies.
Second, it emphasizes programs to ensure rehabilitation of agriculture and a transition to
sustainable development instead of indefinite dependence on external aid. Both are
welcome solutions and commitments. Also, important is the recommendation ensuring
women an equal decision-making role in relief policies and programs.
On the other hand, there is little discussion on how governments and international bodies
will live up to the commitments- the all important money and institutional arrangement
discussions are often missing. Heads of State and Government who will make statements
at the World Food Summit should clarify their strategies and positions beyond vague
generalizations. Otherwise, we will probably see little action on the problems of refugees
and food security after the meeting is over, except, perhaps, more sweet talk.
===========================================================
The New York Times, Wednesday, July 31, 1996
'8,490 Days of Memory'
Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris
By Grace Glueck
Maybe you thought you'd never live to see a chocolate-covered figure of Gen.
MacArthur in battle dress, standing nine feet high.
Well, brace yourself.
Douglas
It's the set
piece of this show by Ik-Joong Kang, a Korean artist now living in the United
States.
Chocolate, by now almost routime as a sculptural material, is also the medium
for 8,490 three-inch squares made by Mr. Kang, each bearing a U.S. Army emblem in
relief, hung in rows on foil-covered walls.
The figure 8,490 represents the number of days Mr. Kang lived in Korean before
emigrating, and the chocolate represents the candy bars that G.I.'s gave to South Korean
children.
MacArthur's presence symbolizes his status as a war hero in South Korea,
where as commander of the United Nations forces he is credited with driving back the
Communist invasion from the north.
Here, the General stands on a large, square
platform consisting of 8,490 clear plastic cubes, each embedding a memento from Mr.
Kang's childhood: buttons, marbles, toys, etc.
The chocolate, Mr. Kang has said, represents the bittersweet promise and prosperity of
America versus the erosion of traditional Korean values that the American presence there
portended.
The three-inch sizes of the squares represent a lot of things, including the
average distance between people's eye and the small size of Asian cultural items.
as this show looks, it smells divine.
===========================================================
Klutzy
The Village Voice, July 30 1996
Art Short List : Ik-Joong Kang
By Kim Levin
The overpowering smell of chocolate reaches your nostrils before you even enter this
irresistible installation. It wafts from the 8490 three-inch squares of chocolate, each
customized with a U.S. army insignia, that grid the foil-covered walls. It's exuded by the
monumental chocolate-covered statue of '''''General Douglas MacArthur, who stands,
field glasses in hand, on a shimmering platform of plastic cubes (8490 of them, too)
containing childhood trinkets and mementos. 8490 Days of Memory refers to the number
of days Kang lived in Korea before emigrating here, as well as to the MacArthur monument
in his Korean hometown and the candy bars GIs tossed to him when he was a kid. But it
alludes to cross-cultural social issues a lot more complex than bittersweet nostalgia.
Through September 27, Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, 120 Park
Avenue, at 42nd Street, 878-2550.
===============================================================
Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris
July 12-September 27, 1996
8490 Days Of Memory
by Eugenie Tsai
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the
things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring,
more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls,
remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the
tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
-Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
Ik-Joong Kang's 8490 Days of Memory is an installation composed of 8490 squares of
polished clear plastic cubes amassed on the floor below. Each 3-inch square bears an
insignia from the IS Army cast in relief; each 3-inch cube contains a memento from the
artist's childhood. Stacked cubes form a pedestal which supports a 9-foot-ftatue of
Korean war hero General Douglas MacArthur entirely coated in chocolate. For Kang, the
sweet scent and taste of creamy chocolate play the role of the tea-soaked madeleine in
Proust's novel Remembrance of /thing Past, bearing in their essence "the vast structure of
recollection." In 8490 Days of Memory, the combination of materials and imagery
coalesces into an elegiac evocation of Kang's twenty-four years in Korea-exactly 8490
days-prior to immigration to the US in 1984. This evocation of Kang's past includes the
complex interplay between Korea and American cultures, which continues into the present.
Born in 1960, Kang grew up in Seoul and attended grammar school near a US army base
in the It'ae Won district of the city. He and fellow students would line up at the gate of the
army base and shout "give me chocolate" at the GIs, who would respond by throwing
candy bars as they drove past in jeeps. Given the postwar poverty of the time, chocolate
was an extraordinary treat. When he was successful in retrieving a candy bar, Kang would
slowly remove the foil wrapper before inhaling the scent of chocolate-"smelling America"to prolong the moment. This sweet and potent fragrance prompted him to fantasize about
America. After this ritual, he slowly consumed the precious substance, letting each bite
dissolve in his mouth.
Such was Kang's introduction to American culture and the genesis of his perception of
chocolate and GIs as icons of America, icons that became deeply imbedded in his
memory. The themes of remembrance and the past are underscored by the 8490 clear
plastic cubes, each containing a small object from the artist's childhood-marbles,
miniature masks and animals, windup toys, dice, shells-frozen, preserved, stopped in
time. Unlike recollections released by smell and taste, there objets provide concrete
evidence of Kang's youth in Korea during the sixties and seventies.
Whereas the chocolate squares and the objects encased in plastic allude to Kang's
personal life, the figure of General Douglas MacArthur, with its chocolate patina, suggests
a collective memory and global dimension to 8490 Days of Memory. ManArthur, who
commanded UN military forces during the Korean War, was responsible for driving North
Korean forces back over the 38th parallel. Although eventually dismissed by President
Truman, in the eyes of South Koreans he was a hero, representing freedom, bravery, and
the American dream.
============================================================
Art Net Magazine, July 1996
8,490 Days of Memory
The Whitney Museum at Philip Morris
by Joan Kee
The Korean American artist Ik-Joong Kang is primarily known for mosaic-like installation
works made up of 3 x 3-in. squares representing various aspects of his life, ranging from
the names of artists who influenced him to notes on his masturbation practices. His most
recent work, the tour-de-force 8490 Days of Memory, ventured into history via Kang's
memories of his childhood in the impoverished, war-torn Korea of the early 1960s.
The work represents a colossal effort--a larger-than-life statue of General Douglas
MacArthur was constructed from chocolate bars and stands in the middle of the gallery on
a low dais made of cubes of resin. The walls of the gallery are covered with Kang's
trademark squares, here made of chocolate and imprinted with U.S. military insignia. The
work underscores the powerful way that memory can function through vision, smell and
even sound--notably the Tom Jones hits, popular in the U.S. and Korea in the 1960s, that
Kang has playing in the gallery. Deployed in a relatively small space, the work poses a
kind of sensory overload from the strong smell of chocolate, the maculation of the space
through the repeated squares and the giant statue. The physical disorientation suggests
the similar fragmented process of the recollection of long periods of time.
Chocolate is a powerful metaphor to Kang.
As a rare luxury in post-war South Korea, casually supplied to local children by the
victorious G.I.s, chocolate symbolizes the sweetness of American plenty while its silver
foil is a literal representation of the glittering promise of wealth and the American dream.
Kang drives home this point by incorporating MacArthur, who gained a place in the hearts
of Koreans (and a place in their parks, through proliferating statues) by masterminding the
Inchon landing, a crucial turning point in the Korean War. The memorialization of the past
is also emphasized by small toys and other childhood memorabilia set within each
transparent resin block under MacArthur's statue. Each gonggi (jacks) set, each eraser
and each pair of doll shoes are fossils embedded forever in Formica, as if to suggest the
enduring quality of Kang's memories.
Despite the importance of memory and the past, Kang's work is very much a work of the
present, avoiding Korean American artistic clinches that attempt to compensate for lack of
substance by using inscrutable components of the past. Chocolate is a double entendre
metaphor because when exposed to heat, it rapidly melts and this property parallels
Kang's idea of America's waning military power in both Korea and the world.
Likewise, the childhood memorabilia used are not actual objects hoarded from yesterday
but objects that can be found or purchased anywhere in Korea today. Such an
incorporation of present objects implies that memories are often remembered using the
constructs of today. The conflicting ideas of the present and the nostalgia of the past
give Kang's 8940 Days of Memory a pulsating energy that reminds the viewer that the past
and present undergo a process of constant interaction.
Ik-Joong Kang, 8940 Days of Memory, Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris,
120 Park Ave. (E. 42nd St.) New York, N.Y. 10017, July 11-Sept. 27, 1996.
JOAN KEE writes on contemporary Asian and Asian American art.
Artnet 1996
=========================================================
Reviews, June 27, 1996
365 Days of English.
Assemblages by Ik-Joong Kang at the Contemporary Arts Forum.
By Marina Walker
Ik-Joong Kang reconstructs the world from bits and pieces of culture. Small blocks of
carved wood, cheap radios desperately expelling pop music, storms of computer and
notebook paper, all become quadrants of catalogues information. Wrapped into bundles,
word are scrambled into units, signs made into signals - public communications privately
discovered, then offered for your contemplation.
This exhibition, entitled 365 Days of English, marks Kang's southern California premiere.
Installed in the main gallery of the Contemporary Arts Forum, the show is multifaceted and
complex. Organized via a network of grids that dissect as they connect, the grids act as
an underpinning, providing a scaffolding to support Kang's inquiry into popular American
culture. The results he achieves are not random, though; beneath the intricate
construction, there are hints of impulse, of an intuition-driven exploration that makes the
work exciting. Huge quantities of information pass through his hands, so much that t is
hard not to notice the personal, perhaps obsessively aware dedication to detail that
seems to drive him. Whatever creative spark calls Kang to this forum, he makes his point,
and it is well taken.
Some artists find objects and refine them until they become numinous. Stripped of
confusion and common associations, they are streamlined, clarified, and polished to
transmit the essence of what they represent. Kang does it differently. Working from the
inside out, he makes his mark with simple, common materials like Scotch tape, ink,
notebook paper, and wood. These last two he covers with thousands of words. In both
English and Korean, the artist has emptied his mind: What comes out is interesting, funny,
and playfully ironic.
The architecture of his structures and the subtle nuance his materials evoke simulate
spiritual destinations and transmit Kang's dominant aesthetic. A tent becomes a temple; a
covering for its dormant inhabitants: pre-awakened dialogues temporarily restrained to
receive the Buddhist's "light of knowledge." A wood block wall acts as a shrine of
personal and intellectual contemplation. Paper and tape, ink and pastel-pale hues of
green, pink, mauve, and blue are delicate and suggest non-opaque Japanese shoji
screens.
The first structure you see upon entering the gallery is large enough to walk inside.
Inscribed, plastic-sheathed streamers of gridded paper link to build a double column. The
moment you enter the narrow opening, you discover another column of paper, this one
small enough to easily walk around. Kang turned the paper inward, towards the center.
From the outside, there is not much to see other than the shape of the thing itself. Inside
the first column, it's another story. Words, drawings, collaged magazine pictures look like
a calmed-down version of giant, chatty tarot cards: "Visual relationship, simple traces,
inextinguishable source, pictorial plane, virtual reaction, bug zapper," say the walls of this
paper temple-skyscrapper.
Towards the rear of the gallery, reams of computer paper form a tent-like shelter. Outside,
on the paper "roof," Kang stenciled printed words with red, blue, and green felt-tipped
markers. Hundreds of broken utterances like "PAiNTEr" and "NAVAL," read like humorous,
illogical signs directing you nowhere. Words, cut off from each other, regrouped and
joined to others, as in his wall of wood blocks, are one of Kang's favored means of
expressing himself. Kang settled in New York when he came to America 12 years ago
from Korea. His arrival in the city and to a new culture must have sent shock waves
through his entire system. If he were not an artist, perhaps he would have recoiled from
the jarring. Instead, he responded with ravenous consumption. The evidence of his hunger
for American culture is everywhere. English words, jargon from our contemporary pop
culture, have been collected, regrouped, and juxtaposed with Korean language and
architectural structures. The result of his choreography? Compositions, curious objects of
integrity that demonstrate an edgy assimilation.
Tucked away in the corner of the gallery, but impassably noticeable, three hundred or so
American flag decorated plastic radios, simultaneously screech out a jumble of top-40
tunes. The white noise created by them is grating and disquieting. Trying to ignore it, I
couldn't help but think of Kang, hurrying along the streets of New York.
According to Yin Joo-Heon, one of the contributing authors of Kang's exhibition
catalogue, Buddha Learning English, Koreans have a penchant for making and consuming
soup. Soup is as good a metaphor for Kang's work as any. Like that nourishing fluid, his
artist's voice is a stockpot of individual ingredients that stew themselves into something
substantial. For me, this metaphor illustrates the instinctive process by which culture
creates art. Kang is the product of his culture and where those origins have taken him. By
playing with the ancient motifs and symbols of one, and the written and verbal
communications of another, he has created a new soup, a substance that noticeably
alters the way we perceive our own.
================================================================
The Independent, June 27, 1996
Art Assimilations
By Marina Walker
365 Days of English. Assemblages by Ik-Joong Kang at the Contemporary Arts Forum.
Through August 18.
Ik-Joong Kang reconstructs the world from bits and pieces of culture. Small blocks of
carved wood, cheap radios desperately expelling pop music, storms of computer and
notebook paper, all become quadrants of catalogued information. Wrapped into bundles,
words are scrambled into units, signs made into signals-public communications privately
discovered, then offered for your contemplation.
This exhibition, entitled 365 Days of English, marks Kang's southern California premiere.
Installed in the main gallery of the Contemporary Arts Forum, the show is multifaceted and
complex. Organized via a network of grids act as an underpinning, providing a scaffolding
to support Kang's inquiry into popular American culture. The results he achieves are not
random, though; beneath the intricate construction, there are hints of impulse, of an
intuition-driven exploration pass through his hands, so much that it is hard not to notice
the personal, perhaps obsessively aware dedication to detail that seems to drive him.
Whatever creative spark calls Kang to this forum, he makes his point, and it is well taken.
Some artists find objects and refine them until they become numinous. Stripped of
confusion and common associations, they are streamlined, clarified, and polished to
transmit the essence of what they represent. Kang does it differently. Working from the
inside out, he makes his mark with simple, common materials like Scotch tape, ink,
notebook paper, and wood. These last two he covers with thousands of words. In both
English and Korean, the artist has emptied his mind: What comes out is interesting, funny,
and playfully ironic.
The architecture of his structures and the subtle nuances his materials evoke simulate
spiritual destinations and transmit Kang's dominant aesthetic. A tent becomes a temple; a
covering for its dormant inhabitants: pre-awakened dialogues temporarily restrained to
receive the Buddhist's "light of knowledge." A wood block wall acts as a shrine of
personal and intellectual contemplation. Paper and tape, ink and pastel-pale hues of
green, pink, mauve, and blue are delicate and suggest on-opaque Japanese shoji
screens.
The first structure you see upon entering the gallery is large enough to walk inside.
Inscribed, plastic sheathed streamers of gridded paper link to build as double column.
The moment you enter the narrow opening, you discover another column of paper, this
one small enough to easily walk around. Kang turned the paper inward, towards the center.
From the outside than the shape of the thing itself. Inside the first column, it's another
story. Words, drawings, collaged magazine pictures look like a calmed-down version of
giant, chatty tarot cards: "Visual relationship, simple traces, inextinguishable source,
pictorial plane, virtual reaction, bug zapper," say the walls of this paper temple-skyscraper.
Towards the rear of the gallery, reams of computer paper form a tent-like shelter. Outside,
on the paper "roof", Kang stenciled printed words with red, blue, and green felt-tipped
markers. Hundreds of broken utterances like "PAiNTEr" and "NAVAL," read like humorous,
illogical signs directing you nowhere. Words, cut off from each other, regrouped and
joined to others, as in his wall of wood blocks, are one of Kang's favored means of
expressing himself. Kang settled in New York when he came to America 12 years ago
from Korea. His arrival in the city and to a new culture must have sent shock waves
through his entire system. If he were not an artist, perhaps he would have recoiled from
with ravenous consumption. The evidence of his hunger for American culture is
everywhere English words, jargon from our contemporary pop culture, have been
collected, regrouped, and juxtaposed with Korean language and architectural structures.
The result of his choreography? Compositions, curious objects of integrity that
demonstrate an edgy assimilation.
Tucked away in the corner of the gallery, but impassable noticeable, three hundred or so
American flag decorated plastic radios, simultaneously screech out a jumble of top-40
tunes the white noise created by them is grating and disquieting. Trying to ignore it, I
couldn't help but think of Kang, hurrying along the streets of New York.
According to Yin Joo-Heon, one of the contributing authors of Kang's exhibition
catalogue, Buddha Learning English, Koreans have a penchant for making and consuming
soup. Soup is as good a metaphor for Kang's work as any. Like that nourishing fluid, his
artist's voice is a stockpot of individual ingredients that stew themselves into something
substantial. For me, this metaphor illustrates the instinctive process by which culture
creates art. Kang is the product of his culture and where those origins have taken him. By
playing with the ancient motifs and symbols of one, and the written and verbal
communications of another, he has created a new soup, a substance that noticeably
alters the way we perceive our own.
===============================================================
Korea Times, March 30, 1996
Rising young artist gathers and mixes images of America
By Cho Yoon-jung
In the Korean art world the words of Paik Nam-June are almost scared.
And if he
designates someone as an artist to watch then you can be sure that everyone is watching.
The man under the scrutiny of many eyes at the moment is Kang Ik-Joong, a 36-year-old
artist based in New York who Pail Nam-June prophesied would eventually become more
famous than himself.
As such, Kang's first solo exhibition in Korea opened March 20
concurrently at Hakgojae in Insa-dong and the new Art Space Seoul in Sogyok-dong
through April 20.
This is quite a reception for a name not that familiar here.
But in the United States, Kang
has built up an impressive resume.
In 1994 he held a joint exhibition with mentor Paik Nam-june at the Whitney Museum of
American Art and was also selected for the highly competitive Capp Street Project in San
Francisco.
Last year he showed his works in England for the first time at Leeds
Metropolitan University.
What is the art that has brought Kang to this point?
Kang is known as the 3-inch artist.
His canvases, in wood, resin, paper, sometimes
chocolate even, are all 3 x 3 inch squares.
He has made thousands and thousands of
them, painting or carving on them scenes, words and memories of everyday life.
For the Seoul exhibitions Kang has brought around 50,00 of his tiny paintings and tiled
over the walls of galleries.
Of the vast quantity, 8,490 represent the number of dyas that
the artist has been living in America.
It was life in America that gave his art its unique form.
Arriving in New York in 1984 with
only enough money to pay the tuition at Pratt Art Institute, Kang had to work long hours in
a fruit market for a living.
This never left him any time to paint, defeating the purpose of
his toil.
The solution he came up with was to work on the run.
A 3 x 3 inch canvas fit neatly in
his pocket, along with a portable set of paints, and could be taken out and worked on
while riding the subway or whenever a spare moment presented itself.
The process came
to be an integral part of the final result.
Though each canvas is complete in itself, they are meant to be seen together in their
glorious multitude.
making.
This is what the artist refers to as the "bibimbap" method of art
Bibimbap is a Korean dish which consists of rice and vegetables, bits and
pieces all mixed together with hot chili paste.
Cooking directions go along the lines of
the title of one of Kang's exhibitions: Throw Everything Together and Add.
The bits and pieces in the art works of Kang, a man whose hobbyis reading
encyclopedias, are images and impressions gathered from the streets, from his roamings
and from his private life.
He will stick on the canvas little objects that catch his eye,
cheap plastic toys or parts taken from the furniture in his home.
Apart from the mini canvases, Kang's Seoul exhibition also features his Buddha paintings,
transparent cubes and chocolate works.
The cubes, which are also 3 inch modules, are
filled with objects from the past and trace the story of his boyhood.
The chocolate works, too, are inspired by childhood.
memories of handouts from American soldiers.
taste of America, now his adopted home.
For Kang chocolate brings back
Chocolate therefore represents his first
For the exhibition, special chocolate military
badges were made to order.
To take in Kang's works, one need to look closely at the details and then at a distance to
gain the big picture.
Keeping a proper distance has been, as Kang sees it, one of the
keys to his success.
He looks at American life with the detached eye of the
outsider.
He discovers a side that the locals may be too absorbed to see and reflects it
back to them.
============================================================
Exhibition Catalog, 1996
Life as a Huge Mosaic
By Yi, Joo-Heon
(Director of Art Space Seoul)
December on New York. The weather was freezing outside but Ik-joong Kang's footsteps
were as light as ever. Television reports were forecasting the city's first white Christmas in
12 years and the pavements were already covered with snow. Nevertheless, Kang was
swiftly heading on his way, looking at everything that he passed.
It is a 40-minute walk from his home to his studio and all year around he chooses to
travel this distance on his feet, he tells me. I was suddenly reminded of a mountain trip I
took a few years ago with an ex- 'Partisan,' the defiant North Korean guerrilla troupe
dispatched to Chiri-mountain at the break of the Korean War. After all those years, he was
still skillful as ever on the rocky mountains. And just like that old man, Kang was a skillful
climber of a mountain called New York City.
Walking to and from work everyday, Kang says he observes New York- the New Yorkers,
their lives and everything that exists in the city. In other words, New York in his hunting
ground. Just like a wild animal makes a home on his hunting site, New York has now
become Kang's hunting ground and homeland. Any beast that feeds on his catch of the
day will know-how this familiar and almost boring place called home can turn into a new,
exciting world when the hunt begins.
It was 1984 when Ik-joong Kang arrived in New York. His first years as an obscure art
student were difficult, working 12 hours a day to make a living. It was no wonder that he
spent whatever time he had left on his painting, for to him painting was what survival was
all about. He made mini-canvases for himself to carry around in his pocket, so that he
could work while he was on the subway. This was how his trademark '3-by-3-inch'
canvas paintings were born. Things have changed now. He can now sit back in his own
studio and concentrate on his paintings instead of dividing time between petty jobs, and
painting on the subway. But he is still a wild hunter at heart when it comes to gathering
the images and impressions of New York, which shocked him and stimulated him during
his early days in the city. His working environment may have changed, but the contents of
his works remain the same. And it is to encounter and recapture these images that he
spends 80 minutes of his life everyday walking the streets of New York. Each moment he
stops to pick up the pieces that make up the city, that slice of someone else's life take a
new meaning.
To a stranger, New York is truly a striking city. Everything is big, busy, full of energy,
variety and danger¡|.. still, it is not common that an artist who has lived in the city for 12
years still has an insatiable and continuous curiosity for the place. What is it that keeps
drawing him? The moment I begin to wonder, the artist, walking a few steps ahead of me,
suddenly came to a halt. We were passing by a crowded flea market. He smiled and said
let's have a look. There's a lot to see here, he explains. By the time we made our way
through the crowds, he ahs turned into a hungry hunter again. He seemed totally caught
up in everything he laid his eyes on, as if searching for his prey. I concluded that his
curiosity is an instinct, not something that is switched on an off. Though it is also true that
New York keeps his curiosity on the alert, much more so than any other place in the world.
There are many dangers to categorizing an artist according to a specific culture that he
comes from, for it may or may not be an important part of his work. Especially for an artist
of unique creativity, his works may well be beyond the boundaries of culture identity. Ikjoong Kang is in many ways a unique artist, in understanding the basic mechanisms of his
work, his link with a certain characteristic of Korean culture does come in handy.
Let us try to view his works in link with Korean cuisine. This will prove helpful in the
analysis of his art, and after all, Kang himself is quite an enthusiast on various cuisine.
Seeing from experience, unlike Western or Japanese cuisine, a majority of the Korean
dishes are 'water-based.' Overall, Korean food is high in water content. No Korean meal
is complete without 'Kuk (Korean soup)' or 'chigye (stew.)' In Korean cuisine, these
dishes are not merely a side dish as in the West, and in some cases even make a hearty
main course. The variety of these dishes is almost endless, served in all sorts of different
tastes. It is quite a contrast to the way Western people consume water with their meals,
which are served as 'something to drink,' like tea, wine, beer, juice, or even coke.
Then why have 'water-based' dishes become such a major part of Korean food? With the
risk of sounding like an old-fashioned environmental determinist, I think food culture in
Korea was influenced by various environment factors; climate more suitable for agriculture
than breeding cattle, four distinct seasons and plenty of clean, pure water. Since cattle
was scarce, methods were developed. In Korea, salt-based pastes and sauces make up
for a majority of the fermented food, which are usually cooked in water to be served. This
was probably preferred in terms of hygiene and taste. Furthermore, situated on a Far
Eastern peninsula, Korea was for centuries an isolated country that considered trade and
commerce a disrespectable occupation. The exchange of goods with foreign countries
was not common, which meant there was limited variety in the ingredients used in Korean
cuisine. In order to develop new dishes, I imagine, various cooking methods were
experimented in order to make up for the lack of variety in ingredients. In other words,
chemical change replaced physical change, and needless to doubt, water is the one of
the most important catalysts in processing chemical change.
It could be said that this kind of food culture naturally gave birth to a way of thinking
which focused on 'essence' rather than 'phenomenon' itself. 'Water-based' dishes involve
the dissolution of ingredients and the consumption of its pure essence dissolved in the
water. The essence was in the water, not the ingredient themselves, so the Koreans came
to refer to 'chinguk (thick, undiluted soup stock)' as the highest value not only in cuisine,
but also in life. This expression is often used to describe people of fine character or
artists of great accomplishments. This kind of 'substantialism' in Korea can also be found
in traditional paintings. Which focused music which was not based on the harmony of
sounds as in the West, but on subtle vibrations and solful outbursts. The acclaimed
Korean film (Sopyonje) recently portrayed a traditional musician risking his own human
integrity, in order to achieve the 'chinguk' of all sounds.
What I would like to point out here, in reaction to Ik-joong Kang's art, is the ability of
these 'water-based' dishes to combine, synthesize, harmonize and sublimate the
ingredient. Kang's works are closely linked to these characteristics of Korean cooking. A
wide variety of ingredients can be used for Korean soup or stew dishes because they can
be mixed together with water. Sometimes even the most unlikely mixture of ingredients are
cooked together, but once they are boiled and dissolved in water, there is no room left for
disharmony. Cooking becomes a process of infiltration, dissolution and coming together
into a single entity. Kang himself often compares his works to the Korea dish 'pibim-bap,'
rice mixed with broiled vegetables, meat and hot paste, in similar context with the
'substantialism' of the 'water-based' dishes. The only difference is in the medium used in
the two dishes-rice or water. But they share the same role in that neither add any distinct
taste to the food but simply act as a base for the mixture. The difference is that water
participates more actively in the dissolving process because the mixture is not simply
stirred but heated together.
Kang's artistic method of putting small separate pieces like mosaic tiles to form a single
work of bigger scale reflects the characteristics of Korean cooking in many ways, and
furthermore, an important character of Korean culture. He observes the world around him,
picks up the bits and pieces from that world and uses them to form a world of his own.
He collects his ingredients from the streets, newspaper, television, and from within his
heart. These bits and pieces each tell their own stories, without one dominating the others.
In a survey carried out on South Koreans' political preference by the American military
administration following Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule, a majority of the
people had answered in favor of socialism. This was not based on concrete belief in the
system, but more on the cultural tradition that a country's unity should be based on
individual equality. It was their preferred alternative. The basic cultural consensus of the
Korean people shown here was that all members of the society are unique and individual
and that at the same time, openness and unity should never be lost.
In this context, Kang is an artist who has successfully utilized his cultural traditions. He
displays a dexterous skill for synthesizing his cultural traditions. He displays a dexterous
skill of synthesizing and harmonizing a variety of individual materials in his works. In this
process, his character plays the role of water in Korean cuisine. I may not show on the
surface, but it brings together the bits and pieces of this world and dissolves them into a
unity. In his works Kang's ultimate artistic value is to visualize the artist's invisible
character. This is closely linked to the Choson Kingdom (1392-1910) painters who
described a satisfactory work as an 'accomplishment of noble cause' and their tradition of
placing greater emphasis on an artist's efforts to refine character and intellectuality. Kang
stresses that he would like to do away with any obsession he might have for his own art.
His favorite role model is the baseball legend Hank Aaron, who said, "When I'm at bat, my
mind is not there with me, but far away in the stands, looking down at myself standing on
the grounds." It is evident that Kang finds strength in the Korean tradition of artistic
contemplation and successfully puts it into practice. His invisible characters warmly
embrace the visible world of his art. And in that we can recognize his strengths as a
uniquely international artist who 'comfortably crosses over to and from two different world,
the East and the West.'
When Kang first arrived in New York, he says he was marveled at everything being so
different from Korea. Every little thing, which would have seemed routine and boring to a
New Yorker, was so new and unfamiliar to him. At that time, he was quickly interested in
everything he laid eyes on and soon everything was used as subjects in his paintings. And
as mentioned earlier, thanks to his insatiable curiosity, this process became an important
part of his art.
He was amazed at the fact that everything was different: the shape of a door knob, the
leg of furniture, even the curve of a kitchen knife. Some things were not used as mere
subjects but as object on his canvas. Once, Kang's wife attended his show opening and
was in shock to see the leg from a piece of their furniture stuck on one of works. Kang's
curiosity had left a piece of their furniture 'crippled.'
Kang just can't keep his eyes off little cheap toys sold on the streets. He not only pastes
them on the canvas, but has developed from them an interest in the world of animation.
He has dissolves all sorts of other ditch images from the streets into the simple lines and
figures in his works. After reading a news story about an aspiring dancer from the
countryside who died in a building collapse while working her shift as a part-time waitress,
Kang expressed on his mini canvas the sympathy he felt for the poor artist who had
invested all hopes for her future. Written on some of his works are abrupt statements like
"They work hard for fame.: "I paint for my own sanity." They are Kang's own ways of
reaffirming his own directions in life amidst the everyday ups and downs. During his early
days of painting on the subway, he even carried 'portable' watercolors and even needles
and thread to add colors and embroidery on his drawings. It must have been an eyecatching sight on the trains. Impressionist painters sought freedom from the stuffy studios
by taking their canvas outside. But their outdoor painting did not break any boundaries
between the 'sublime' world of art and the real everyday world. The outdoors was merely
an artistic subject for them. But young aspiring painter Ik-Joong Kang's 'subway painting'
of the 1980s placed art and the real world on same ground. It was a happy marriage of
the two worlds, interacting with each other in equilibrium. The artist was holding on to
reality and reality was holding on to him.
Ik-Joong Kang has been holding on to the images that pass through his life with a small
canvas tucked into his pocket. To judge each of his works by the existing aesthetic
standards f tableau painting is therefore misleading. Each work is simple, momentary and
individual. They are drawings and at the same time, they are paintings and simple
statements. They can also be objective. But most of all, they are little pieces of this world,
in the same state the artist has picked them up in. Only when they are put together within
the artist's character to form a world of their own do they become art. This is clearly
pointed out in painter Byron Kim's words:
"Kang evades the touchy question of quality by asserting that quantity is quality. His
paintings are a virus. He produces them everywhere. You can imagine finding them
anywhere."
His mini paintings look like something that has been painted many times before,
something anyone will be able to paint. But together, they unfold into a world that no one
has seen before and nobody has been able to show. Still, they are sliced of everyday life
in the city of New York, something that 'anyone can recognize.'
I feel that Kang's paintings are not actually painted on a small canvas but on his life's time
itself. His works are not painted on a given space. Rather, they are painted on a concept
of time used to classify the chronological passage and each stage of a lifetime. As the
river of time rolls along reflecting the glittering light of life, Kang's paintings rise to the
river surface like tiny fish scales and encounter the world. These scales float on the river,
flowing along and spreading through the world. If among them, a single scale reaches
someone's heart, that someone will easily be able to picture the other scales. Then he will
soon imagine a huge beautiful fish made up of those scales and marvel at its magnificent
sight. This is the kind of experience that a viewer goes trough upon the encounter f
Kang's rt. His works show, more than anything, that life itself is a miracle, full of marvel
and wonder.
It was in the subway trains that Kang began working on his 3-by-inch paintings, . And
even today, he roams the streets, in order to encounter the everyday life in the city. He is
basically an artist in motion. He paints as he moves along. That is why he can be found
everywhere, like a virus. From the act of constantly moving, and as his self-identity moves
along with him, he has learned the ability to objectify his and life and art, to look upon it
like the Choson kingdom cartographer Kim Jung-Ho made the 'Taedongyo-jido (Korea's
first scientific map of the Korean peninsula)' through his travels across the land, Kang has
learned to view the map of his own life on a larger scale. Like Hank Aaron, he sits n the
stands and looks down at himself at bat. And he paints his own life as if it were someone
else's. In this era of the electronic information super highways, in this era of high-tech
nomads with cellular phones and notebook PCs, he has the rare ability to break out of his
own shell and move around in his true inner self, communication with the world through a
wave more fundamental than electromagnetic waves, a wave that travels beyond history.
His movements are therefore more fundamental than the movements of out time.
As time passes, people say their lives are getting short. They say their days are
disappearing, like smoke in the air. But do the days really disappear into nowhere?
Looking at Ik-Joong Kang's works, I feel that it is quite the contrary. His days pile up with
the passage of time. As the number of his works grows with each passing day, we realize
that it is all the more true. As time passes, he encounters more and more stories to tell,
paints them on his little canvas and they keep poling. His paintings may b enough to
cover up a whole village someday. They may be just small bits and pieces, but his works
seem to tell us that this is what a man can leave behind through his life-long encounterskarma, in Buddhist terms-with the world. His works are the results of the encounters of a
man's life, which have taken on so much meaning in the course. The Bible's teaching that
"one's belief can move mountains" seems not so much about faith itself, but about
looking back at your life to acknowledge "how big a mountain you have moved." Needless
to say, Kang's works is a convincing example of this mountain.
It was a month after our meeting in New York that I spend two days with Ik-Joong Kang at
a small hotel near London's British Museum. He was holding an invitation show in Leeds,
northwest of London. It was clear to see from the TV coverage of his exhibition on
national and local networks including BBC-the BBC anchors even delivered their closing
words while nibbling the chocolate used in Kang's works-that his show was being well
received. It was a successful London debut for him. But he was actually excited about
something else. He was soon scheduled to hold his first solo show in Korea in 12 years.
His Seoul show is to be his biggest solo exhibition to date. He was also excited about the
fact that he was coming home after being away for so long. But at the same time, he was
concerned whether his show will set a good example for the many young artists back
home, calling himself an obscure artist. How should one take such an attitude from an
artist who has held a two-man show with Nam June Paik, has an installation work being
set up at the San Francisco International Airport and has a solo show coming up at the
Whitney Museum? It was his long-awaited homecoming show drew near. There was one
thing he did want from the show. He hoped that the young artists back home would be
able to see in the show his struggles and efforts in New York as an artist from the
outskirts of mainstream Western culture. It was not difficult to recognize the 'hunter' in
him struggles and efforts in him when he said, "No matter how much critical acclaim you
earn from the powerfull men of the art world, it is nothing unless it appleals as
'something'to the pure eyes of the youg as aspiring artists."
To be featured at Kang's Seoul show in addition to his mini canvas paintings, are his
Buddha paintings, wood relief carvings, drawing and objects using transparent cube
boxes with various objects from his youth, symbolizing the traces of his life as an ordinary
Korean. The chocolate worked relive the artist's own memory as a child living near a
American military base in Seoul and at the same time, trace of the chocolate that
American GIs used to hand out to the kids, which is a memory shared by many Koreans.
This memory has been expressed in the forms of U.S. military badges made out of
chocolate. The works to be shown are overwhelming in sheer amount and each has so
many stories to tell. When they approach the viewer together as one grand piece of art,
they become unique, filled with various implications. Just like the taste of Korean'kuk,'
'chigye' or 'pibim-bap.'
Kang and I said good-bye at Heathrow and went each other's way as one headed back to
New York and the other to Seoul. Seeing him depart with a bag on his shoulder after a
month-long stay in the U.K., I saw in him a nomad setting up on another long journey.
This son of the agricultural people from the 'Land of the hermits' had turned into a veteran
nomad spreading his virus around the world. His virus may be five millenniums old, but
after all, coming from the 'land of the Hermits,' it is a brand new kind to the rest of the
world. And tat the same time, it is his own unique kind. This nomad is setting out to put
together everything he encounters into one harmonious unity, like a chef cooking up a
grand bowl of 'kuk' or 'pibim-bap' with all the ingredients from around the world. It is just
as if he is spreading the echoes of Martin Luther king Jr.'s dreams, through the waves he
sends out from within.
============================================================
A.MAGAZINE, 1996
Home Sweet Hamage
By Kay Kamiyama
As a schoolchild in Korea, artist Ik-joong Kang's first contact with America came in the
form of a chocolate bar: In post-war Korea, American G.I.'s would throw the tasty treats
to him and other schoolmates as they walked home from class. "It has a lot of
symbolism," Kang recalls with irony. "When missionaries came to Korea, they had a bible
in one hand and food in the other."
Until now, Kang has relied on painting to communicate his experiences. But for his
installation, "8490 Days of Memory." He wanted to revisit childhood memories of Western
popular culture while casting an ironic gaze on the U.S.'s pervasive influences. It seemed
to call for an entirely different medium, and for Kang, chocolate fit the bill.
In the installation, which opened at the Philip Morris branch of the Whitney Museum in
New York on July 111th, thousands of titles of chocolate- 8490 to be exact-entirely cover
the walls of one room. In the center of it, atop a pedestal of 8490 clear plastic tubes, an
imposing, nine-foot statue of General Douglas MacArthur reigns. Its military might and
mass marketing, arrayed in mythic proportions in one sweet-smelling room.
"Chocolate is priced like a painting," Kang explains, "It has nothing to do with the
ingredients, how much money or material was spent making it. It's more about national
pride an d reputation." It's for that reason, Kang argues, that "Korean chocolate can never
invade the American market," But in 8490 Days," the chocolate tables are already turned:
Kang's exhibition-quality chocolate, he confesses, was made in Korea.
============================================================
The New York Times, Sunday, September 18, 1994
From Korea, the Makings of a Dialogue With a New Homeland
By Vivien Raynor
The Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion in Stamford is busy with small images
that from a distance could easily be mistaken for tiles on a mosque.
Upon entering,
visitors pass through a prescenium packed floor to ceiling with the canvases of Ik-Joong
Knag, each of which measures three inches square.
Beyong, they see similarly covered
walls acting as backdrops for a few assemblages by Nam June Paik.
But the largest of
these stands in a corner alone, a 15-foot-high pyramid of television monitors playing the
same videotape, but not in unison.
The show pays tribute to the multiplicity of everything in the United States and in so doing
it illuminates the contribution made to 20th-century are by artists born in Korea.
Officially,
this contribution began in the late 1950’s, when Mr. Paik, a musician and composer just
graduated from the University of Tokyo, went to work in Germany with the master of sonic
experiment, Kariheinz Stockhausen.
While in Germany Mr. Paik staged an homage to John Cage and, not long after, performed
“Etude for Pianoforte” before an audience that included Mr. Cage.
Without warning, Mr.
Paik took a pair of scissors to the American composer’s shirt and tie.
Oedipal as it may
seem, the gesture proved that besides being the most sincere form of flattery, imitation is
an excellent way of attracting attention.
A few years later and, again in Germany, came the artist’s first exhibition of objects television beaming scrambled images and pianos that had been altered.
this occasion was Joseph Beuys assaulting one of the pianos with an ax.
The kicker on
Small wonder
Mr. Paik merged with the Fluxus rebellion, an updated version of Dada and a precursor of
Performance art.
After moving Manhattan in 1964, Mr. Paik branched out into video; in 1965 he taped Pope
John 6’s visit to New York and showed the result two hours later at the Café a Go-Go.
The rawness associated with spectacles he once engineered has departed from his work,
thanks to technological progress and, in particular, to the synthesizer developed by Mr.
Paik reigns as the electronic master, producing imagery that is corporate smooth.
The shapes in the Whitney pyramid, a 1982 work titled “V-yramid,” throb and repeat
themselves to a virtually inaudible sound track.
The shapes are brightly colored
abstractions with figural illusions and for a while the eye tries to make sense of them, only
to give up and go with the uninflected flow, as with normal television.
In the show’s catalogue, Eugenie Tsai (the show’s curator as well as the director of the
branch museum), describes the exhibition as a dialogue “between life and art, different
artistic traditions and different generations.”
Indeed, the gap between the two performers seems unbridgeable, but, soon enough,
affinities begin to emerge.
Mr. Paik may be a latter-day Duchamp to Western
sensibilities, but the émigré characteristics so obvious in Mr. Kang’s work can still be
detected in Mr. Paik’s.
One is an elliptical sense of humor.
Ms. Tsai observed that
“While Cage brought a Wester’s eye to a sustained interest in the East, Paik has done just
the opposite.”
Mr. Paik does it most effectively by placing a wax approximation ofBuddha in fron of a
small television all but buried in earth.
which can include the viewer.
Behind stands a camera recording the scene,
There is humor enough in the idea of Buddha
contemplating a television screen with the same detachment that he brings to the cosmos.
But the idea acquires an edge when one realizes that the philosopher’s stare is no less
glassy than that of a family watching, say, “Married With Children.”
As everyone knows, sights and customs that go unnoticed by the natives of a country are
lodes of profundity - or absurdity, as the case may be - for immigrants.
Although Mr. Kang, now 34, is one of several Korean artists mining these lobes, he does it
in a stream-of-consciousness way that passes for innocence but is firmly based on his
studies of traditional painting in Seoul and of the Western variety at the Pratt Institute in
Brooklyn.
Ms. Tsai points out that the three-inch square has a special significance in Asian cultures,
being, among other things, the perfect size in Zen thought.
But she goes on to explain
that the format was just right for an artist obliged to support himself in two jobs, one in
Manhattan, the other in Far Rockaway, Queens, since it enabled him to work while
traveling on the subway.
Everything is subject matter for Mr. Kang.
In one picture, he portrays two profiles, the
first captioned “Gallery Artist,” the second, slightly larger, “Artist.”
of a hand grenade he writes “Chicago/ Was/ Very Cold.”
Underneath a picture
He flips from international
politics to cocaine and sex.
Finally, there are the pairs of handwritten words - usually a noun modified by an adjective
- that occupy the wide borders on the drawings.
“Rational concept,” “singular
judgment” and “added significance” are some examples.
Behind the wall of pictures
titled “Buddha Learning English,” the artist himself can be heard on tape practicing such
combinations until he goes them right.
In a catalogue essay, the painter Byron Kim remarks that “for Paik and Kang nothing is too
small to be elevated and celebrated.”
Ms. Tsai quotes Mr. Kang likening his output and
that of his mentor to bibimap, a Korean dish that requires the cook to “throw everything
together and add.” (The phrase is also the title an installation shown in a full-page color
illustration in the show’s catalogue.)
The question is whether either artist would have
scaled the heights of obsession is he had remained at home.
It is a beautiful show but prospective viewers are advised to take it in small doses, with
plenty of rest in between.
The show remains through Sept. 28.
==========================================================
The advocate and Greenwich Time, Sunday, August 21, 1994
Whitney’s art “happening”
By Carolee Ross
It’s an actual art happening, full of visual stimuli and excitement, just like those former
Metropolitan Museum Director Tom Hoving produced during the 60s and 70s.
But this
one is better because it’s right in our backyard.
This opening takes place at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion in
downtown Stamford.
It’s called “Multiple/Dialogue,” featuring the works of Korean-born
artists Nam June Paik (b. 1932) and Ik-Joong Kang (b.1960), several generations apartbut their mindset and approach to the visual world seems incredibly close.
Buses from New York cruise up to the Whitney entrance, releasing throngs of eager art
lovers.
Inside the lobby of the Champion building, musicians in authentic Korean
costume play ancient instruments, welcoming visitors to the celebration.
The “Who’s
who” in Korean-American society arrives in evening attire, proud to be a part of the
evening’s festivities.
Fairfield County has finally made it to the Big Art World.
With the arrival of Eugenie Tsai,
new Director of the Branch of the Whitney Museum of Art at Stamford, and curator of this
exhibition, viewers are coming to our neck is more than the posh galleries of the isle of
Manhattan.
There’s an exciting energy here, filling the walls, bombarding our sense with imagery,
saturating our eyes with color.
If we get close enough to the entrance walls, we can hear
tiny voices whispering through the artworks.
When we go into the main room, "Devil in a
Blue Dress," blares from multiple rows of stacked TV screens, filling our senses with sight
and sound.
‘Multiple, multiple, multiple’ is not an understated theme, but seems to
scream across the surface of both artists’ work, while underneath, the geometric format
of the grid holds it all together.
It is the shorthand staccato sightplay of two journalistic composers, expressing the
rhythms of American civilization.
The work of both artists examines all the categories of
the world, not for its immediate appearances, but for immediate appearances, but for its
physical energies, for its performance.
Movement becomes material, the space in which movement occurs becomes as important
as mass, the immediate effects of sound, light and color on the senses offers a more
direct road to the spectator than do recollections of previous experience, allusions to
myths and legends, or symbolic constructs.
Writes essayist Byron Kim in the exhibit’s
catalogue, “Both Paik and Kang deal in the metaphysics of the mundane.”
The artists are both here, being interviewed for Korean television in front of Paik’s
work.
“Cage in Cage,”
The work is a homage to the avant-garde composer who
provided the stimulus for Paik’s venture into fine arts.
As curator Tsai informs us in her
catalogue essay, Korean-born Paik began his career as a musician and composer,
graduating from the University of Tokyo with a thesis on composer Arnold
Schonberg.
Paik met John Cage in Germany and in 1959, gave a performance titled
"Hommage a John Cage: Music for Tape Recorder and Piano” in 1959.
year.
The following
Paik, who describes himself as a “Mongolian-Manchurian-Korean nomad,” jumped
off the stage during a performance of Etude for Pianoforte and cut attendee Cage’s shirt
and tie with a scissors.
with the group Fluxus,
Ultimately, he began to produce objects only after associating
“a loose, anarchic association of artists who, in actions,
exhibitions, compositions and manifestoes, created a rebellious alliance against perceived
institutions and trends in high culture.”
Paik began experimenting with video as early as 1964, filming Pope Paul VI’s visit to New
York and later showing it at the most diametrically opposed of places, Café a Go-Go.
His technique gradually became more refined, and with the aid of synthesizers developed
by himself and engineer Shuya Abe, he was able to program a number of television
monitors into the same installation.
Viewers stand fascinated in front of Paik’s installation.
“V-yramid,” while the multiple
screens, arranged in the manner of an ancient pyramid-turned-ziggurat, display
constantly changing images and montages of actual television programming.
Tsai’s
analogy to the ethos of the sixties, “which advocated the effacement of the artist through
the use of industrial materials and fabrication,” can be easily understood in relationship to
the work.
Paik eventually passes out on a comfortable chair in the lobby from jet-lag exhaustion,
but artist Kang, who is also celebrating his thirty-fourth birthday, shares some of his
philosophical views about his 3 x 3 inch square works Their size can perhaps be
compared to a stenographer’s shorthand pad, allowing the artist to record his continuous
impressions of his adopted country.
A two - part, Thursday evening lecture series sponsored by the Whitney begins Sept. 8,
with Curators’ Dialogue, when John Hanhardt, curator, film and video and Eugenie Tsai,
branch director address the art and careers of Nam June Paik and Ik-Joong Kang.
On
Thursday, Sept. 22, Ik-Joong Kang will appear to discuss his art, the exhibition and
cultural issues.
All presentations begin at 6 P.M>
=============================================================
Space Magazine(Korea), 1994
Multiple / Dialogue: Paik, Nam-June and Kang, Ik-Joong
(Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, 7. 22 - 9.28, 1994)
By Jeong Lee Sanders-
Multiple/ Dialogue: Paik, Nam-Jun and Kang, Ik-Joong is the title of a new exhibition on
view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion in Stanford, Connecticut, from
July 22 to September 28, 1994 and features three multimedia installations by Paik, NamJun and four installations consisting of 25,000 paintings, woodcuts, and drawings by
Kang, Ik-Joong.
The summer exhibition features the two Korean-born artists of different generations and
draws on their similarities.
Paik, born in 1932, is an established international figure who
resides in New York City and is renowned as the father of video art.
While Kang, born in
1960, is at the start of his career and is becoming known for his work which consists of
thousands of 3” x 3” paintings, woodcuts and drawings chronicling his life in New
York.
Despite the obvious fact that both artists are Korean-born and pursuing careers
abroad, the Whitney Museum’s choice to exhibit the work of these two artists from
different generations, each using different media is significant.
“The pairing was not
made on the basis of media, but on shared themes and systems of
organization.
American popular culture, the stuff of daily life, holds Paik and Kang in
thrall, and appears as image, artifact, and sound in their respective work.”
After Kang graduated from Hong-Ik University in Seoul in1984 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts
degree, he enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated in 1987
with a Masters of Fine Arts degree.
city.
Since then Kang has lived and worked in New York
It is said that Kang began to use the 3” square format during his days as a student,
so he could work while on the move in the city - the paintings could easily fit in his
pocket as well as in the palm of his hand.
Of Kang’s four installations exhibited at Multiple/ Duakigye, his first piece [Untitled 19841994] represents a decade of Kang’s work of mixed media on 3” x 3” canvases (some of
which serve as speaker covers) all created since his arrival in the United States.
Many of
the images depicted are figurative-a simple image of a Korean grocery (the king Kang
spent long hours working in when he first arrived in New York), a detailed rendering of a
muscle man, and watercolor impressions of Susan and others; while other images are
nonfigurative- a presentation of several geometric shapes or a colorful painting of an
abstract atmospheric jumble.
Some canvases just have a single found object glued to
the surface-a cup, a jar, a plastic child’s shoe, and a rubber stamp; while others have just
a few hand printed words-“I saw Spike Lee” or a pasted newspaper ad text for “Baby
Wipe.”
The paintings are worked with a light touch and give the impression of merely
recording the essence of experiences or images, rather than highly labored objects of
art.
However, the impressive visual impact of the work is largely a result of their
awesome presentation - being grouped together by the thousands in an immense and
seemingly endless grid format.
In 1990, for a similar installation entitled The sound paintings, Kand installed small
speakers in the back of 2,000 of the 7,000 paintings shown.
Sounds from nature emitted
from the paintings alluded to elements of Korean landscape painting: water (using the
sound of the ocean); mountains (using the sound of birds); clouds(using the sound of a
thunderstorm); and trees (using the sound of the wind).
Kang continues to incorporate
the element of sound in his installations and in this exhibition has included an audio
recording of his own voice reciting phrases in English taken from various magazines,
newspapers and books.
In addition to the works on canvas, Kang exhibits his woodcuts created in the same 3”
square format.
The subject matter for these works is also taken from Kang’s daily
experiences in New York.
But these element take on a new more steadfast presence as
they are moments captured in wood which undoubtedly is a more demanding and time
consuming process.
Paik, Nam-Jun’s three installations from the 1980’s and 1990’s but refer to his entire
career.
V-Pyramid (1982) is a stack of forty televisions on top of one another.
stacks are stepped on one side and sheer on the other.
The two
They are placed at right angles
to form a corner, or V-shape, such that the top of the pyramid and the point of the “V”
coincide.
viewer.
The viewer faces the interior of the “V” and all forty television screens face the
The kaleidoscopic imagery changes rapidly in response to a musical soundtrack
of rock and roll and traditional Korean music.
In Cage in cage (1993), made the year after the death of composer John Cage, Paik pays
final tribute to Cage, Nine video monitors confined in a large multi-storied birdcage
display footage of Cage using rapidly changing images-some smiling while others
gradually dissolve into and out of Buddha.
By pairing Paik and Kang together, the exhibition draws more on their formal concernsthe use of the multiple or module as and organizational device.
Though these artists may
be of different artistic traditions and of different generations, their distinctive methods in
capturing and commenting on contemporary life are in other ways quite similar.
===========================================================
San Francisco Examiner, Wednesday, Feburary 2, 1994
Remarkable Opening for Capp Street
By David Bonetti
Capp street Project, the alternative space that offers artists three month-long residencies,
has moved.
Founded in 1983 in David Ireland’s 65 Capp St. corrugated metal house, it
moved in 1989 into a former automobile detailing facility around the corner on 14th
Street.
Now, in quest of a good caffe latte, it has moved to 525 Second St. near South
Park, the “nice” neighborhood where architects and designers hang out in trendy
California-style trattorie.
Although located in a neighborhood bourgeois art patrons found less than nice, Capp
Street’s former digs were extraordinary.
A large, low space with a wide wraparound
balcony, it was reminiscent of an early Christian basilia, and it offered some artists the
opportunity of a lifetime.
Ursula von Rydingsvard, George Stone, Carl Cheng and
Francesc Torres, among others produced unforgettable installations there.
But for other
artists, the space was too extraordinary - they were overwhelmed by it and their work
showed it.
Giving up its former space is an architectural loss.
extraordinary, but probably more practical.
The new space is smaller and less
Designed by Bay Area architect Stanley
Saltowltx, the 8,00-square-foot area is divided into three large spaces on two floors,
none of which is grand enough to intimidate.
flexibility.
It will allow Capp Street greater
Now, it can feature three artists simultaneously, and it won’t have to close, as
it sometimes did for lengthy periods, when time-consuming work is being constructed.
Saitowits, who is best know for designing private houses in the opne landscape, has
minimally refurbished the old brick warehouse building, bringing it up to seismic standards,
and creating usable and flexible spaces.
His single grand statement is an open, steel-
meshclad staircase that rises from the middle of the first floor.
gesture.
It is a wonderful
The grand opening exhibitions, which continue through March 19, feature three
artists.
Korean-born New York City resident Ik-Joong Kang steals the show.
Everything Together and Add,” he has done just that.
In “Throw
Filling the first space you enter
directly from the street, it is composed of 15,000 small paintings, drawings and woodblocks, rising in a grid from floor to ceiling on a temporary triangular structure.
There’s a story to the work’s genesis.
Kang recounts that when he first moved to New
York in 1984, he had a two-hour subway commute.
Now waiting to lose that amount of
art-making time, he devised a format of 3-inch-squre canvases that fit in the palm of his
hand that he could work on while riding the trains.
25,000 works.
In 10 years, he has made nearly
Capp Street states that he has made more paintings than any other artists
in history - an improvable claim, but one I am willing to accept.
Kang used his art as a tool to help him learn a new language and assimilate into a new
culture.
His voracious work is a record of virtually every word, every phrase, every image,
every sign that passed through his consciousness.
It is classic New York immigrant art,
and, in its different way - it is a product of the conceptual ‘80s and ‘90s - it joins with
work by earlier generations of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Joseph Stella and Raphael
and Moses Soyer to tell the story of the immigrant experience in New York City.
Kang Does not exhibit a style of his own, but he serves as a medium for the styles of
representation that reached his consciousness.
place, the dominant style is pop.
Not surprisingly, given the time and
His work is filled with phrases and images borrowed
directly from American, specifically New York, popular culture.
Vulgar, crude, visually and
verbally cacophonic, ugly at times, mean but also funny and surprisingly generous and
loving, it posses an unstoppable dynamism.
If you can make it there, you can make it
anywhere, and through a remarkable exercise in productivity, Kang has infiltrated its
significant list of makers.
Bay Area artist Mildred Howard shares the ground floor.
In “Last Train: From Caney
Creek to 16th and Wood,” Howard continues to address the historic migration of Southern
blacks to Northern cities in search of a better life.
Expanding her ideas to real scale,
however, she becomes too literal for the good of her art.
Howard has laid a real train track through the gallery, a life-sized metaphor for the
diasporas that could stand equally well for any number of migrations.
Making it specific
with the blown-up images of a woman posing for the camera with her son, Howard only
reminds you of the delicate poetry of her smaller scale work.
A life-sized chicken coop
with three live chickens and a cart laden with box lunches of fried chicken and pound
cake (which the artist distributed at the crowded opening) also fail to make vivid in the
way her more modestly scaled work does the trauma, the hopes, the implicit
disappointments of the great migration north, in this case, to Oakland.
New York object-maker Donald Lipski has made an installation titled “The Starry Night”
that uses 25,000 double-edged razor blades.
Based on the kinds of patterns Vincent
van Gogh painted in his famous picture, Lipski arranged the razor blades in waves of
energy spreading across three walls of the large upstairs gallery.
From a distance, the
blades merge in one’s vision to serve as a three-dimensional line that also casts its own
shadow upon the wall.
Like his better-know work that juxtaposes found objects in unlikely combinations, “The
Starry Night” jolts one’s perception.
However, spreading across surfaces that are
interrupted by a brick window-wall and a staircase that emerges from below, the
installation’s energy dissipates as a totality.
The best time to have seen it was at the
opening, when hundreds of opening-nighters helped create a sense of danger as they
pressed close to the exposed blades.
==============================================================
San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 26, 1994
'Future Is Now at Capp Street'
By Kenneth Baker
What kind of future does contemporary art have in San Francisco?
Another piece of the
puzzle falls into place today with the opening of the Capp Street Project's new quarters at
525 Second Street.
The inaugural show at the refurbished Secodn Street warehouse comprises three involving
site-specific installations by New "York artists Donald Lipski and Ik-Joong Kang and
Oakland Mildred Howard.
Three artists' works are vastly different, but together they make Capp Street Project's
point that contemporary art can be both fun and edgy, wild and meaningful, mysterious,
personal and civic-spirited.
Tissue of Contradictions
If these qualities form a tissue of contradictions, no problem.
To live with contradictions
is something we all have to learn: It can lead to tolerance and flexibility.
Helping us do
that is one way art proves its value.
Named for its original venue, a Mission District house renovated by San Francisco artist
David Ireland, the Capp Street Project has been one of the West Coast’s most exciting
alternative exhibition places.
For the past five years, Capp Street’s primary facility has been a shed-like building on
14th Street, a location increasingly uninviting to visitors and staff alike.
Capp Street differs from most other alternative art settings, here and elsewhere, in
offering residencies to the artists it invites to show. (The Second Street building
incorporates a small apartment for visiting artists.)
With the new building, promises director Linda Blumberg, the Project's program will
become more international.
She already has commitments from Colombian sculptor
Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Cildo Meireles of Brazil and the Swiss collaborative team of
Chiarenza and Hauser.
Local artists will not be slighted, however.
Two of them, Larry Andrews and Jim
Campbell, are already scheduled for the coming year.
Sparely restricted inside by architect Stanley Saitowits, Capp Street's new facility has
exhibition areas on two floors, connected by a central steel staircase.
The street-level windows currently offer intriguing glimpses of Ik-Joong Kang’s
installation "Throw Everything Together and Add," which is said to consist of 18,000 tiny
paintings, wood relieves and drawings.
Three-Inch Canvases
Kang is a native of South Korea who moved to New York a decade ago.
His job entailed
a two-hour commute by subway, so in order to keep painting, he began to work on threeinch-square canvases that he could make anywhere.
Individually, Kang’s paintings are slight as hors d'ouevres.
Some of them even resemble
hors d’ouevres, being bite-size confections of color, matter and idea.
Kang’s paintings are inspired by his experience of sudden immersion in urban America,
with very little English.
His little pictures, plastered from floor to ceiling in a triangular
first-floor space, are notations of things thought, noticed and purchased.
Their numbers
alone convey the sense of heightened, constantly interrupted alertness that anyone feels
in a real of unknown language and customs.
You never know what you’ll discover in Kang’s paintings.
One is a collage of buttons,
one has a different-colored plastic letter in each corner: "R," "A," "C," "E."
Anther mocks
the artist’s own ear for English: An angry-faced little man utters a puce word-balloon
containing the word "FAUCK."
Others contain self-admonitions - "I SHOULD HAVE
INVESTED IN BERLIN" - or cracked memories of media - "I WANA TRUMP CHECK," "CAR
THAT MAKES SENSE."
Speakers in the gallery play a tape of Kang rehearing English phrases such as
"scandalous identity," "real estate development," "commodity character," "social
significance," "serious art."
No one of Kang’s pieces weighs much in any sense, but cumulatively they evoke a
mentality richly textured with curiosity, humor, anxiety and gladness at being alive.
Big numbers work for Donald Lipski too.
For a piece called “The Starry Night,” he has
inserted some 25,000 razor blades in the sheetrock walls of the second floor gallery.
The blades form swirling patterns that echo the whirling night sky of Vincent Van Gogh’s
“Starry Night,” a vision of the night sky awash with energy.
More chillingly, as you inspect them closely, Lipski’s razor blades reiterate a reference to
one of the most famous images in 20th century film: the moment when a straight razor
slices an eyeball in “”Un Chien Andalo” by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel.
Lipski’s work is as elegant as it is creepy, bringing to mind not just street violence but the
patterning of magnetized iron filings, the isobars on weather maps and swarms of steel
butterflies.
The piece even forms a kind of mural 5 o’clock shadow.
The play of blades and shadows is especially pleasing up close (but not too close), as
now object, now shadow seems the more substantial.
One of the marks of the
installation’s success is that it works aesthetically at every viewing distance.
Mildred Howard’s “Last Train from Caney Creek to 16th Wood” reconstructs an
anonymous memory of African American’s transit from the South to California by rail.
A
section of railroad track with ties and roadbed snakes through the first floor gallery toward
an old family photo, blown up to wall size.
On one side is a wooden cart stacked with box lunched of fried chickens and pound
cakes: a literal remembrance of the new arrival’s customary welcome.
On the other side sits a chicken coop with three live chickens.
The visitor can enter part
of the enclosure, sit in a rocking chair, listen to John Coltrane on headphones and
contemplate a journey out of oppression, which for most black people in America still has
far to go.
============================================================
Art New England, 1994 December / January 1995
Multiple Dialogue, collaboration with Nam June Paik
by Michael Rush
Among living artists, Nam June Paik is one of the clearest links between the historical
avant-garde, as represented by Stockhausen and Duchamp, and the Cage-ian
modernists who flowered with Fluxus and went on to make even greater marks in mixedmedia art and performance. For more than thirty years, Paik has devoted himself to a
highly disciplined experimentalism that has placed him, ultimately, in the forefront of
media artists. His installation in the now infamous German pavillion at last year's Venice
Biennale was a no-holds-barred explosion of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling video and
sound images that created a frenzy of postmodern phantasms. It seemed he had gone
about as far as he could go.
Paik is also a household word in the Korean homeland from which he emigrated at the
outbreak of the war. He was recently paired with a younger Korean artist, Ik-joong Kang,
at the Whitney in Stamford. Curated by director Eugenie Tsai, Multiple/Dialogue: NamJune
Paik and Ik-Joong Kang was more of a high gloss excuse to place these two countrymen
side by side than a natural fit suggested by their work. Nonetheless, the result was an
intriguing presentation of two highly individual artists of different generations who share at
least the common bond of triumphing as artists in new and complex cultures.
Paik is here represented by three installations: Buddha Watching TV (1994), V-yramid
(1982), and Cage in Cage (1993). The Buddha piece consists of a roughly-shaped clay
Buddha contemplating a TV set that contains his own live image, thanks to a video
camera trained on him. It show Paik at his best, reminding us of his earlier, meditative
work, like Zen for TV from the early 60s and video Buddha from the mid_70s. Here, buried
in dirt, the TV monitor becomes an icon of a lost civilization, but one still blessed by the
eternal calm of the Buddha. The viewer's image also appears on the screen as he or she
passes by, thus adding layers of possible meanings.
Sharing the same space in the galley is Kang's Buddha Learning English (1992-1994), a
giant mantra of a work consisting of more than a thousand 3 x 3' canvases of Buddha. An
accompanying audiotape has the artist reciting loaded phrases that he is learning in
English: "intolerance," "cultural exchange." Each of Joong's installations here is
monumental in size, if not in scope, and like Oaik's, also mesmerizing. Though in a very
different way. Joong's miniature canvases (reportedly 25,000 of them here) are the
product of an intense, hermetic imagination. The literal and figurative isolation of these
fragmentlike creations pulls us inward toward the artist's obsessive preoccupations,
whereas the TVs in Paik's V-yramid assault our privacy with manic imagery and rock'n roll
music. Whether or not this results in a valid "dialogue,", as Ms. Tsai would have it, is open
to question.
The thousands of 3 x 3" woodcuts by Joong that line the wall around Paik's Cage in Cage
(1993) are depictions of sportsmen, children, trees: everyday kinds of things. It is a bit of
a stretch to equate these with the Zen-based everydayness of the master, John Cage,
who is movingly eulogized in Paik's video installation (nine small screens in a bird cage).
What we feel, rather, is the wise simplicity of the sixty-two-year-old Paik compared to the
assertive, labor-intensive energy of the young Joong.
But then Paik can also be that intense, youthful, and maniacally detailed craftsman.
Perhaps the point here is that these two unique artists from the same distant land are both
essential parts of the crazy quilt that is contemporary American art.
=================================================================
New York Newsday, February 4, 1992
An Installation of 7,000 Ik-Joong Kang Works
Tiny Windows on the World
By Esther Iverem
The childlike drawing of a green army tank reappears in artist Ik-Joong Kang's multimedia installation, "3x3," at the Queens Museum.
Over one tank are the words "Born in N. Y."
Over another: “War."
And over a third: "We Like Tyson."
Each image and its caption is contained on a canvas measuring 3 inched by 3 inched
among 7,000 equally small works in the installation.
Located in the museum's first-floor
contemporary-currents gallery, the solo exhibit, which also features recorded voices, is
scheduled to run until April 12.
Kang's varied words, paintings and mounted found objects - a laminated Ritz cracker, a
Ken doll head or sexually explicit references to the human form, for example - are a little
alike the quick images and sound bleeps to which we've become accustomed in the video
age.
They create a scrapbook of passing thoughts as well as deep meditations and
actions taken.
Assembled in random fashion on the sides of three room-sized cubes,
the snippets of language and image form a jumbled history of Kang's life and insight into
his artistic process.
" I believe ideas are floating in the air, not just in my mind," says the artist, a stocky man
with an easy laugh, as he sits in the museum's first-floor auditorium.
mind.
I try to let ideas follow me.
"I just open my
Art can be a method of seeing many things."
Drawing an invisible line between his eyes, Kang says the distance is three inches.
"This
is my window to the world," he adds, holding in front of his eyes the small frame he has
created by connecting four of his fingers.
It is a window, he says, that overlooks mountains: "I use mountains as a metaphor," he
explains.
"I climb a mountain every day to see future.
another one to climb."
I climb one and see there is
There are also views of rivers, religion, sex, politics, people and,
in the process, New York City.
The artist "consistently uses humor and irony," says Louis Grachos, organizer of the
exhibit and now director of exhibitions for the museum.
In the brochure / catalog
accompanying the show, Grachos writes that "the cross-cultural imagery" expressed in
Kang's work "mirrors the flux of his own identity as an Asian artist assimilating into the
Western world."
Kang started working with his small format while living in the Ridgewood section of
Queens and commuting for hours to a job at a flea market in Far Rockaway.
was consumed going to classes at Pratt Institute in Fort Greene.
More time
In the deep pockets of
his coat he carried a few small canvases, small drawing papers, pens, magic markers,
Liquid Paper and a needle and thread.
Fitting the paper or canvas snugly in his palm and
using a mixture of the portable media, he sometimes completed four works in one trip.
"Trust Me.
I Won't Get You Pregnant," words copied from a public service advertisement"
in the subway, found its way onto one of his canvases, as did "Pregnant? We Can Help."
But many of the canvases reflect his own introspection:
"I have to lose weight."
"I will never go to Atlantic City again."
"I had to become strong."
"I sold painting to Prudential Company today. I want to eat sushi tonight."
Kang now lives in Chelsea and tries "to catch and observe all the living" of city life during
his daily walk to his small studio in Chinatown.
With more time to paint, he has expanded
his canvases of words to paintings in a variety of styles, from realistic portraits to abstract
images to, most often, images such as the cartoonlike green tank.
Another cartoon
includes two men, one seated, underneath the caption: "I go to Chinatown for haircut."
Kang was born in 1960in Cheong Ju, a small town in the center of Korea - "just like
Omaha," he says to explain the location.
His father was a businessman, but Kang says
he comes from a long line of painters including his grandfather and greatgrandfather.
One ancestor, Se-Hwang Kang, he ways, is considered one of the first
Korean artists to combine elements of western painting, such as perspective and shadow,
with elements of traditional Asian painting.
After studying painting at Hong-Ik University in Seoul, where he also exhibited works at
the National Art Museum, Kang arrived in the United States in 1984.
he has had group
and solo shows of his miniature views of the world, including at the gallery at Montclair
State College in New Jersey, the Broadway Windows Gallery in Manhattan and the Amelie
A. Wallace Gallery in Old Westbury.
Starting in 1986, Kang began collaborating with other artists for performance works.
In
1986, he staged a "“One Month Living Performance" during which he simply painted and
created his art before visitors to the Two Two Raw Gallery in Manhattan.
Two years ago, Kang received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the
Arts.
Last year, apropos of his early working environment, he received a commission
from the Metropolitan Transit Authority to create an artwork for the city’s transity
system.
(Kang will do the work when the Main Street / Flushing station in Queens is
renovated, tentatively planned sometime in the next four years, according to Tito Dacila of
the MTA.)
During his early subway-riding years, the artist says, he was inspired by the
intricate tile work in many of the stations, which reminded him of panes in a Japanese
shoji screen.
Graffiti was also an influence.
In 1990, Kang added sound to his exhibits by installing a tiny speaker behind each
painting.
At the Queens Museum, repetitious pedantic phrases from a Korean-English
language course - "I'm so full.
I couldn't eat another bite" - are reminiscent of the
artist's own early experience in this country.
"All these little squares are keeping track of time," he says of the paintings.
how time passes away."
"So I can see
One of Kang's favorite paintings reads: "My painting is good for
memory."
==============================================================
Godzilla, 1992
Ik-Joong Kang
By Eugenie Tsai
Ik-Joong Kang's recent installation, "3 x 3" at the Queens Museum, takes its title from the
preponderance of three's underlying its structure: three eight by-eight-foot cubes, each
face covered by canvases measuring three inches square, arranged in orderly rows.
These hang evenly spaced, twenty-four to a row, creating an overall grid. The grand total:
6,912 canvases, an average number for one of Kang's exhibitions.
It's not just the sheer volume of canvases that overwhelms the spectator, but the diversity
of media and themes. Some of the canvases are merely supports for an actual object-a
tiny model airplane, a dangling earring, Lilliputian doll shoes lined up on shelves. Other
canvases are paintings of bot the abstract and representational variety. Still other
canvases bear aphoristic sayings such as "Death. Tombs are opened. Amen," or personal
revelations: "Uncle Died" inexplicably juxtaposed to a small, crudely outlined animal.
Kang's opus celebrates the ordinary, the accumulated random incidents and objects of
quotidian existence, with its sensory overload and apparent lack of an overriding
significance. The work is diaristic, but nonsequential. The wide range of themes that
preoccupy Kang-sex, death, the spiritual, bodily functions, the art world are obvious, and
these in turn exemplify the cosmic questions of life that confront everyone. "3 x 3" also
refers specifically to Kang's encounter with American culture as a recent Asian immigrant.
This aspect of the work is heightened by an English language tape for Koreas that plays
continually in the gallery through speakers in some of the canvases. The tape centers
around food as a means of access to an alien culture, featuring such inane phrases as
"what kind of salad dressing would you like? I'll take thousand island.," and points to the
central role food plays in Korean culture.
The random arrangement of the individual canvasses means that the spectator assumes
an active role in creating meaning; the "meaning" of each canvas depends on its context,
where it falls in the larger "picture" so to speak. What is to either side of it, above and
below. "3 x 3" suggests an approach to time that is diametrically opposed to that found in
European history painting,(exemplified b Jacques Louis Davis) in which a single moment
is depicted, the climax which both encapsulates the past and both encapsulates the past
and points to the future. Kang's sense of time is one of a vast, undifferentiated field,
where peaks and valleys are non-existent. Instead, the accumulated moments, both
significant and meaningless, comfortably coexist, and the artist is free to constantly revise
what was meaningful in the past depending on the present.
"3 x 3" subverts the structure of he grid, a formation and means of organization
synonymous with modernism. Although the modernist grid made reference to the
uniformity of mass-produced culture, it also spoke of the absolute autonomy of art, of its
complete removal from life. Kang, on the other hand, employs the grid because it is such
a perfect means by which to present his experience of the undifferentiated commonplace.
The modernist grid thus acquires cultural significance.
While "3 x 3" addresses everyday existence in terms of popular culture, "Collection of
Buddhas," at the Asian American Arts Center, shifts to the realm of the spirit, with
references to folk art. Once again Kang employs cubes-four painted a brilliant red, on
which are affixed three-by-three inch canvases, each bearing a brightly colored images
of a seated Buddha. These canvases have deliberately been made to look ancient, with
the surfaces scraped to obscure the image. Interspersed among these are others with the
Buddha filled in with seeds, drawn in a diagrammatic style or overlaid with a cosmic spiral.
Although the grid has been abandoned, the serial depictions of Buddha are echoed by the
repetitious chanting of Buddhist monks on tape. In addition, the entire installation is
multiplied by mirrored panels on the wall. If e sensed in "3 x 3" that Kang regarded the
flotsam and jetsam of the commonplace almost reverentially, here he seems to be
suggesting the illusory nature of that very reality.
=============================================================
The Village Voice, December 11, 1990
Throw Everything Together and Add
By Arlene Raven
Boats, airplanes, a fish and bird, each rendered in a three-inch square, shit declining,
equidistant dots.
Elsewhere among the 7,000 tiny canvases that cover the art gallery at
Montclair State College, 30-year-old Ik-Joong Kang scrawls, graffiti-like.
Borovsky's shit."
"I saw
The emperor-has-no-clothes appraisal is also pointed at David Salle
(whose name labels a reclining woman with legs spread split-beaver style) and other
(slightly) elder (male) artists.
While unmasking the manure of the more mature by intermixing imitation and criticism.
Kang exonerates his own excrement: "I shit good." As evidence, a umber of modules are
packages already wrapped and addressed to the permanent collections of major New
York museums.
Observing the long-standing affinity between artists and their feces. Kang's concrete
fragments contain the germs of literally thousands of personal narratives of creation and
waste.
A woman's bare ass.
mountain toward a metropolis.
Flowers and dragonflies. A fleet of bombers flying over a
Seeds for protean configurations of far-flung,
thoroughgoing self-portraits, these small squares are, appropriately, rudimentary and
incomplete, but also clever and concise.
Kang always carries a blank canvas in his pocket.
made with anything at hand.
Cupped in his palm, a painting may be
More than one completed work outlines the artist's hand
itself as well as its movements across the surface.
Clay, metal, rice, plastic, ballpoint
pen, and paint are among the media scaled under the shiny varnish.
Kang can work while walking on the street or standing in subways.
Afoot anywhere,
In fact, the official
and unofficial decorations of subways, accompanied always by noise, provided a model
for Kan's pictures in their environment.
And the tiles lining station walls influenced the
size of the individual units within the overall structure of "SSOUND PAINTINGSS."
One thousand of the works exhibited are wire for sound.
A small speaker is attached to
each little square or block and together they are placed on the center wall of the
installation.
Below the large rectangular composite, masses of slender red and black
wires connect every speaker to one of 10 sound-generating monitors.
monitor, a single sound issues.
From each
This audible element sends birds chirping and asses
braying in their cells.
The monitor is the heart animating an exposed circulatory system of sight and sound that
(according to the exhibition catalogue) is a metaphor for the center of being.
Central,
too, are the compositions of numerous breast and target motifs scattered throughout the
three walls.
intersect.
But the center seems also to be every point at which tones and images
And the locality of an observer can, likewise, be anywhere in the midst of the
"SSOUND PAINTINGSS," while s/he remains at one with the heartbeat of the body/ system.
The tuneful din interweaves Western popular music, street sounds, the ebb and flow of an
ocean, and traditional Korean rhythms.
York.
Kang, born in Seoul, now lives and works in New
His audio choices evoke his birthplace, its history, world-wide natural phenomena,
and his current society. Random and irreverent, his eclectic chorus comes, with time
spent listening, to resemble euphonic hymns indigenous to sacred music.
geographical and temporal origins in his harmonies are deliberately diverse.
But the
As such,
they expand the territory of the spiritual and the designations of its potential audience.
The crosscultural milieu in Kang's work can be seen as well as heard. His images suggest
the process of adopting, adapting, rejecting, and merging cultural heritage with cultural
environment.
irony.
To convey the uneasy juxtaposition, he consistently uses humor and
In one frame, for example, "America" (sic) becomes the caption for a distinctly
non-Western text written in the sky surrounding a toweringly un-American architectural
monument.
In another, a red heart badge carries the logo "white love."
Kang views the modular structure of "SSOUND PAINTINGSS" as reminiscent of a Japanese
Shoji screen - a Zen art form in which the whole is made up of numerous smaller
segments and in which the entirety can be envisioned from the tiniest part.
But the
arrangement of vast numbers of subway tiles in very long rows, a framework that seems
to Kang to measure time and space, equally affects his construction.
The grid that organizes "SSOUND PAINTINGSS" also appears in an artist's book Kang
recently produced with his 1990 tax return.
Here it is likened visually to the facades of
contemporary American skyscrapers and verbally with the U. S. mentality toward
economic growth.
American flags often fly fully unfurled in front of gigantic office
buildings whose uniform windows fill the page.
Accompanying a picture of Kang's 1988
Broadway Windows installation is the directive "throw everything together and
add."
Under the photograph of another previous installation of large numbers of small
works, the analogy "Many is like money" makes the socioeconomic point.
Abundance in these terms refers directly to Kang's art production but also to the
assumption that despite this country's woeful economic forecast, Americans expect ever
more prodigious production as the primary cornerstone of well-being.
Kang's emphasis
on counting canvases adopts a traditionally American method of self-evaluation, arrived
at by tallying how far we have moved from where we began.
The critique of and affinity with American social philosophies and conditions in Kang's
work may explain many of its contradictions.
Although diaristic, the personal moments
stilled for split seconds within the rhythmical continuum of the artist's arena seem
dispassionate.
"Art," he writes, "is good for killing time."
know what to paint" or observation at close range.
Even the confession "I don't
"She just fucked/ will fuck again," can
be denied in the next block or applied to someone else.
The distanced quality of even primal or highly intimate subjects may result from Kang's
conception of creating paintings as "transferring" images.
These visual ideas are
grabbed "from the air," digested as quickly as possible, transmitted to canvas, then
discarded.
Via equal space to cultural icons like Micky Mouse, household items such as
clothespins, and symbols including crosses and pyramids, all are positioned as similar, if
not identical.
Kang has the voracious appetite of a Pop artist for schematically absorbing and imprinting
the world. "EAT ART" occupies a focal position in its tiny environment and is spelled out
with the same large block letters as "GOD IS POWER."
The all-out desire in "SSOUND
PAINTINGSS" emanates from Kang's genuine zest for the physical world, its pleasures and
presence.
And desire characterizes his work most fundamentally.'
A deliberately artless art, Kang's work is itself of nature and a participant in the life of the
artist.
"For a dancer who was killed in a ceiling collapse at an Upper West Side croissant
shop," he writes on one of his paintings.
that day last spring?
Was Kang with me at Broadway and 75th Street
Did he see, as I did, the dead woman taken from the wreck?
he contemplate the fates that slow our steps toward safety?
Does
=============================================================
Sunday Star-Ledger, December 9, 1990
Exhibit features thousands of pocket-sized paintings
By Eileen Watkins
A writer may carry in his pocket a small journal, in which to record his every passing
thought, and eventually have a piece of work that is interesting enough to publish.
Artists have been known to do the same thing with sketchbooks.
New Yorker Ik-Joong
Kang takes the idea a step further, though; he never leaves home without a pocket-sized
canvas.
Each of his three-by-three-inch compositions becomes either a painting or a collage,
reflecting his mood or observation of the moment.
He groups thousand of these for a
startling installation on view through Dec. 19 at Montclair State College.
The Korean-born artist calls his show, in the College gallery, "Ssound Paintingss."
It
covers three walls, two of them featuring 3,000 "visual paintings" each, and the center
one displaying 1,000 canvases backed with speakers that broadcast sounds.
Although
most of his works could be described as introspective and postmodernist, they cover a
wide range of styles, from near-realism to constructivist assemblage.
Kang got the idea for the small scale of his individual paintings from the wall tiles he
observed in the New York City subways.
He says their square shape, vast number and
tiny rows reminded him of Zen art, which utilizes many smaller screens to create its
structure.
He began working on the tiny canvases in 1984, and says that since then, "I've never left
the house without an empty canvas in my pocket."
Kang works while riding the subway
or walking down the street, trough what he calls “the desire of digesting ideas as much as
possible, and as quickly as possible.”
The speakers of his sound paintings are controlled by 10 different monitors, each
producing one single sound and one visual image.
All are connected by black or red
wires, which represent the blood vessels of human body, to a central monitor, signifying
the heart.
The Montclair installation nicely captures the onslaught of endless ideas that passes
through the human mind, even in the course of one day or one hour.
Spontaneous and
uncensored, they include a fair number that are vulgar, in both sexual and scatological
terms.
The occasional four-letter words and graphic image do not, however, convey real
hostility.
Sometimes the mood expressed is mild irritation, but more oftenit is
bemusement at our physical foibles.
In either case, it is often funny.
There is a visual
reference here or there to a controversial Robert Mapllethorpe image, underscored by one
ironic panel that reads "Safe Art."
Kang's miniaturized graffiti also include rather original religious slogans, such as "I O God"
and "God is Power," and pithy observations about nationalism and interpersonal
relationships.
Visually, he offers cartoonlike scenes of warplanes and tanks, hovering
spaceships and grinning aliens, which could come from the margins of a schoolboy's
notebook.
Among these, he juxtaposes more haunting images such as melancholy
portraits; silhouettes of lonely, mysterious dogs: sinister snake heads; minimal landscapes,
and colorful, freehand, abstract designs.
There are some fairly realistic depictions of
birds and insects.
In addition, he creates tiny assemblages built around found objects such as a small
propeller, a shapely Barbie doll leg, a plastic flower, a toy bomber, a shaving brush and a
glass doorknob.
Nailheads from large, crisp numbers.
A hand-printed phrase may
relate to a painted or collaged image - Kang tells us concerning a scrap of sharp metal,
"It made my tire flat on a rainy day."
Most of the time, we are given only the provocative
statement, such as "I don't paint for the world," "Someday I will leave me," and "Bad Art =
Good Art."
One square says flatly, "This is a painting without picture."
The sounds, as far as I could distinguish them during my visit, divide up into three or four
types: lilting flute music, Oriental singing, falling rain, and explosions that might have been
thunderclaps or crashing waves.
Like the pictures themselves, they merge the natural
and the man-made, in a tolerable cacophony.
Kang is now at work on a project called " Journey of Small Paintings," in which he hopes
to involve thousands of participants living in seven different countries.
"It allows entrance
into the world of diverse ethnic groups and races scattered throughout many countries, to
document various situations of creation," he says.
The project is scheduled for exhibition
at the Hunterdon Art Center, Clinton, in April 1992.
================================================================
ARTSPIRAL, 1991-WINTER
Sound Paintings
Montclair State College Art Gallery
November 2-December 19, 1990
By Byron Kim
This installation is like a mosaic in which each tile is a discreet object.
On his constant
palm-sized format Kang attaches anything that occurs to him as he walks around, looking
to make art.
Subsequently, his art comes in the form of plumbing fixtures, dried cat shit,
used erasers, advertisements, photographs, dirt, food, glass, you name it.
some of the paintings to scrawl notes in his native Korean and in English.
have cartoonish images in paint, ink or pencil.
Kang uses
Many of them
His work is the visual equivalent of free
association: each painting is a visual entry in the diary of an obsessive young New York
artist, like any young New York artist, who wants to get ahead.
The artists has compared his work to the tiles on the walls of New York city subway
stations and to Japanese Shoji screens, but his installations have more the visual
immediacy of storefronts on Canal Street, where hundreds of items are crammed into a
window space, each of them winking and blinking for one’s attention.
It’s a dizzying task
trying to look at the paintings individually, and in an effort to escape sensory overload,
one’s eyes tend to rest on those with bits of text.
Upon examination there are about a
dozen or so motifs or categories with which Kang is especially obsessed.
The most
telling are the paintings that have simple depictions of mountain landscapes, usually
consisting of two outlined humps with a small caption.
Three of them are captioned in
Korean script:’
1.
“The mountain is good”
2. “Mountain Road”
3. “Faraway mountain”.
Another says in English, “I want to live in the mountain.”
These paintings could be seen
as parodies of Oriental landscape, but their persistence and simplicity betray a strong
sympathy with their Buddhist models.
The scribbled longings for the life of an ascetic
coincide well with the audio part of the installation which combines the sounds of
traditional Korean music with heavy thunder and rain.
These references to the pastoral
and to a “proper” spiritual life can be seen as an antidote to the actual spirit of the
exhibition, which is additive, kitsch and all New York.
These few Zen-like references also
bring up the possibility that these works are themselves the manifestation of a crazed,
peculiarly urbane kind of devotion.
Some of the paintings serve as conventional acts of atonement, for example on says, “I
repent.
Amen.
God. “ Many others come in the form of idiosyncratic confession or
resolutions: 1. “I don’ts know what to paint.”
forever.”
3. “I have to be a strong boxer.”
“I ate white ginseng = I will be somebody.”
2. “I want to make paintings that last
4. “I will never go to Atlantic City again.”
Kang will not treat to the mountains
presently; he is busy trying to make sense of life in the big city.
5.
Of course, in Kang’s oeuvre the double-humped mountains can also be read as breasts,
to which the artist seems equally devoted.
Having sex and thinking about sex run a close
third behind eating and shitting in a world of priorities dominated by art or, more to the
point, dominated by making 3 inch by 3-inch paintings.
a blank canvas or two in his pockets.
This modus operandi or two in his pockets.
modus operandi endows his art with utter immediacy.
Beat enterprise for the nineties.
Kang never leaves home without
This
His work can be seen as a kind of
A couple of the paintings propose an interesting
purpose for art: “I paint for memory.”
Such a comprehensive and particular endeavor
can lead on to suppose that beyond acting as souvenirs, these little pictures actually
comprise the artist’s memory.
Prudential today.
For instance, one canvas announces, “I sold paintings to
I want to eat sushi tonight.”
(presumably the artist’s, possibly his father’s)
Another depicts a somber male face
captioned by the lament, “Dad died.”
To
another the artist has affixed a sharp metal object and written, “It made my tire flat on a
rainy day.”
Kang’s is a maniacally democratic memory, like a computer’s, where every bit of
information, whether life altering or inconsequential, gets equal weight.
revelations about art get more than equal time.
Kang: 1. “Art is Masturbation”
However, little
Art means many things to Ik-Joong
2. “Art is Energy”
3. “Bad Art = Good Art”
4. “I want to
paint is for Fun.”
A number of Kang’s Asian-American counterparts in the art world make cameo
appearances.
himself.
One canvas says, “Martin Wong,” beside a long-haired portrait of Wong
Another seems actually to be made by Bing Lee, simply stating, “Bing 1990.”
Nam June Paik, a fellow Korean-American artist appears numerously, once associated
with the sign for infinity, symbolizing Kang’s hero-worship.
deified.
Others are also
Joseph Beuys’ last name is spelled out in Korean letters.
A miniature copy of a
Francesco Clemente self-portrait states, “Clemente looks like his paintings.”
Another
says, “I think Clement has a sense of humor.”
One canvas epitomizes this hero-
worshipping tendency, “Good Artist likes me.”
Transposing one letter in this happy boast
would get closer to the point, “Good artists, like me.”
On the most practical level these canvasses are instruments for positioning Kang among
these good artists.
3 x 3 inch paintings can fit-in anywhere, and along with their
amusing posturing, they can be seen as a strategy for wedging Kang into the art
world.
Like a disease his work uses persistence and omnipresence as a survival mode,
and, barring a retreat to the mountains, Kang may yet infect us all.
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ARTimes, November 1990
Ik-Joong Kang
By Marion Budick
Where does an artist store 1,000 paintings?
If the artist is Ik-Joong Kang, the answer is:
in a large suitcase.
Each of Kang’s paintings is exactly 3x3 Inches, that is.
Except for their Lilliputian size,
however, most of them are of traditional construction: a standard canvas stretched and
stapled to a wood frame.
ink.
He works in oil, acrylic, plastic liquid, watercolor and Sumi
Some of the tiny canvases also have found objects attached or arranged in
glassed-over “windows” in their centers.
Kang began working in this scale in 1984.
“Since then,” he says, “I’ve never left the
house without an empty canvas in my pocket.” He often paints on the street or on subway
trains.
In fact, the idea for the small paintings first came to him from the tile walls that
line most subway stations. “From a distance,” he explains, “it looks like one big tile wall,
but up close, each tile stands alone.”
In his mind it seemed like Zen art, in which, he
says, the idea space is 3” x 3”. “It is like a Japanese Shoji screen that divides areas of a
house. Each small square is part of a bigger space.”
Kang arrived in the United States seven years ago after receiving a BFA in painting from
Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea.
Three years ago he received an MFA from Pratt
Institute and has since dedicated himself fulltime to painting. “When I first came to this
country, everything was so new that I wanted to immerse myself in every new sight and
sound and taste.” “From the beginning, Kang began picking things up off the street to
incorporate in his paintings, from broken toys to candy wrappers. “Collecting these
materials from everywhere I go became an important routine in my daily life,” he says.
Kang and his wife now live in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.
His diminutive studio is 20
blocks south on lower Broadway. Although his training has been as a painter, Kang
considers himself a performance artist.
His “performances,” which he has given in Soho
and Brooklyn galleries, consists of creating his little painting in front of the guests.
To date, Kang has completed some 8,000 canvases, working on 10 or 12 a day.
At first,
he sold individual paintings. Then it dawned on him that he was depleting his
inventory.
Now he sells an idea for a story that can be assembled in an infinite number
of ways depending on the canvases selected and how they are arranged. He also has
1,000 sound paintings.
year.
“I go the idea from a Christmas card someone sent me last
It had a melody chip inside that played a tune when you opened the card.” With
the help of a computer literate friend, Kang installed tiny speakers behind each 3” square
canvas.
Controlled by a MAC computer, 10 amplifiers will eventually connect to 10,000
different speakers, each amplifier controlling 1,000 speakers, from which will come a
fusillade of musical sounds from contemporary avant gard to traditional Korean. “I’m
trying to create ‘total art,’” he says.
art.
“Traditionally, people went to a gallery just to see
I want them to be able to immerse themselves in it, to be able to ‘see and hear’ a
painting.
I’d like to convert a gallery into a visual concert hall.”
In the near future, Kang plans to travel to several countries in Africa as well as to China
and Czechoslovakia. He says he’s like to “conduct” the works and let people from the
different countries paint them.
“I want to invite them to play with their imaginations in my
world.” An exhibit of 6,000 of Kang’s painting, including 1,000 sound paintings, will be on
view at Montclair State College Art Gallery November 2through December 15.
www. Ikjoongkang.com