WHERE I WORK

Drawing on Korean cultural traditions to assemble a mise-en-scène of today

Well into my conversation with Suki Seokyeong Kang at her Seoul studio, as she was explaining the many components of her projects (paintings, mats, mora, jeong), and how she evolves them into new projects, she turned to me and paused. Seeing my expression, she asked, “Is it too much?” and then exclaimed, “No? I think it is too much!” I reassured her that I had understood her by pointing to a stack of canvases (“Mora”) with a mat laid on top and said, “It’s layered, like this.” She laughed and then went back to explaining about the woven rush-mats, the invisible boundaries they create, their references to chunaengmu (the courtly “spring nightingale dance”) and how she commissions them from artisans on the island of Ganghwado in “north South Korea.”

Kang’s studio is located upstairs in a boxy, minimalist building of pale-colored bricks in Seochon, a residential neighborhood west of the Gyeongbok Palace. It sits at the base of the 338-meter-high Inwangsan Mountain, whose craggy granite top was famously depicted by the painter Jeong Seon in Clearing After Rain in Mt. Inwangsan (1751). The neighborhood is also known as the birthplace of Sejong the Great (1397–1450), the fourth king of the Joseon dynasty and the creator of the Korean Hangul alphabet, and was home to famous 20th-century poets Yun Dong-ju (1917–1945) and the avant-garde Yi Sang (1910–1937), who both died in Japanese custody during the colonial period.

Kang’s door leads up a steep staircase into a concrete-walled space illuminated by large south-facing windows overlooking the black-ceramic-tile roof of a hanok— the area is still home to many of the traditional buildings—and several large trees, with the high-rises of central Seoul in the distance. An office area of desktop computers and bookshelves occupies the window-side of the space. Kang’s thin-framed painted sculptures, towers of paintings, wool-wrapped forms and woven mats are stacked, hanging and arrayed around the rest of the space, like the backstage of a theater.

Over coffee, Kang began our conversation by proposing that she and I see the practice of painting in a different manner, based on our cultural heritages. She was trained in Korean painting at Ewha Womans University, where she still teaches, and explained that the way she learned to think about painting was that everything had to be channeled or “poured out” onto the confines of paper in the form of highly controlled brushstrokes. She referenced Jeong Seon, who developed a “true view” way of depicting the landscape that separated his art-making from the Chinese-influenced style that dominated Korean art up to that time. Kang said she is in a similar position of conflict, in which she finds herself trying to be contemporary although she’s rooted in traditional ways. For her, Western painting is based on the premise of documenting the world and particularly its social conflicts, whereas her own art is rooted in a desire for social cohesion and a harmonious existence.

Throughout her practice, Kang explores the coming together of individuals into collective forms. Many of her recent works are based on the traditional Korean method of musical notation, Jeongganbo, in which a grid of rectangular forms (jeong, 井, meaning “a well”) represents each note, with markings within the space to indicate pitch and duration. The form was invented by Sejong the Great to allow people to sing as, previously, music could only be enjoyed by the court and high society. Kang connects Sejong’s attempts to codify Korean music with the painter Jeong Seon’s desire to make a distinctly Korean style of landscape painting. In her own work, each “Jeong” becomes a window and represents “the land where I stand” and how she thinks about the frame as a space for individual actions and expression that are then assembled together into a cohesive or balanced composition. In her installations, the jeong form appears as wooden frames or frames painted in pastel colors, that she then assembles into standing forms on wheels, or mounts hanging from the walls.

The “Jeong” are one element of her installations. Another is her paintings, which she calls “Mora”—a term that comes from linguistics and refers to a unit that specifies syllable weight, stress or timing. These canvases are specific to Kang, roughly the size of her head and torso, with dimensions of 55 by 40 centimeters. She makes one every day, in what she describes as a personal practice rather than an effort to depict something, and often displays them in tall vertical piles, so that only the sides of the canvases, streaked with dripping gouache paint, are visible. At her Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia exhibition “Black Mat Oriole” in 2018, more than 30 of these canvases were piled together as part of a larger installation based on the modular forms and objects in her practice.

I had first met Kang at the Gwangju Biennale in 2016, as she was looking for a spot to affix the wall-label for her installation of Black Mat Oriole (2011–16) in the cavernous Biennale Hall. The components of the installation there were muted-colored, matte-painted metal panels pierced by holes ranging in size from small to wide; slender wooden frames in the dimension of the jeong; and cylindrical forms on wheels (called “Heavy Rounds” or, in the knitted-wool versions, “Warm Rounds”). In the three-channel video Black Mat Oriole that was shown two years later in the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, “activators,” as she calls them, wearing black clothes on a black stage, move these objects around the stage, rearranging them in new, abstract spatial configurations, in a collective dance performance of her objects. New segments in the choreography are announced with the wooden clap of a bak. Referring to how she had shown the progression of the same project in two consecutive editions of the Gwangju Biennale, she reflected: “My work is always unfinished, because it can be transformed.”

As we surveyed the other objects in the studio, Kang leaped back in time to talk about one of her earlier projects, Grandmother Tower (2011/13/18), first made while she was studying at the Royal College of Art in London. In the original version, she stacked five cylindrical metal forms to her grandmother’s height and wrapped the metal in colorful wool thread. The structure leaned against the wall, representing her grandmother’s frailty, with the metal forms becoming like bones and the thread like skin, Kang explained. The work was a tribute to the woman who raised her, and whose relationship to the past Kang said she never fully understood. “I was always debating with her,” she said. Whereas her grandmother refused to talk about the hardships of her life raising four children on her own, Kang believes that “the past is not the past; it is tradition.” Other sculptures around her studio similarly relate to caring for her halmeoni, like the series of stacked, curving forms in Circled Stairs (2016–18) that Kang says refer to her grandmother’s inability to put her foot up on the steps without tripping on the lip of a stair.

The new material in Kang’s work in 2018 were the hand-woven rush-mats made by Ganghwado artisans and dyed and patterned to her specifications. At the Liverpool Biennial in 2018, she showed for the first time the front of the “Mora” paintings, along with mats placed on the floor and a wooden jeong-based sculptural arrangement in Land Sand Strand (2016–18). The palette of Land Sand Strand featured the more natural tones of the rush-mats and black, giving an air of deep restraint. The work’s video version begins with three activators dropping the mats at the click of the bak. Then they engage in a dance of forms against a black background, moving her sculptural objects into sometimes complex, sometimes sparse arrangements of interrelated shapes.

After our tour through her recent practice, and my prying into the corners of her studio, looking through the frames of the “Jeong” and the stacks of “Mora” and admiring the abstract forms of the mats, Kang wanted to show me one more thing. She led me up another steep set of stairs that opened onto a roof terrace lined with a simple metal balustrade with diagonally aligned slats creating slanted shadows. From the roof of this contemporary building, we could see rising above the neighborhood the craggy top of Inwangsan Mountain—looking exactly as it does in Jeong Seon’s painting from two and a half centuries ago. For a moment, I felt I’d seen a painting the way Kang does.