Seongu Kang: Solo Exhibition — A Sketch of Understanding to Be Completed Tomorrow

Seongu Kang Solo Exhibition: A Sketch of Understanding to Be Completed Tomorrow. Opening: June 23, 2017 (Fri), 5:00pm.

Accepting that uncertainty is the essence of life, and that everything is in constant flux, is harder than it sounds. Our craving for "stability," built on perceptions and knowledge already gained, breeds subtle misunderstandings and errors in how we see the world. Just as someone we've known for over a decade can suddenly feel like a stranger, a laziness in understanding leaves us tracing only the trail of what has passed, never the "it" of the present moment. The layers of perception we accumulate as each instant becomes the past knot together into a single mass — sometimes offering the comfortable ease that comes with cognition, sometimes occupying reality with its full weight.

What once brimmed with a mutable freshness, once processed through understanding and settled by someone into a meaning or definition, hardens into a solid mass: can that heaviness be offset by the relief of "knowing"?

What I do through my work is trace something that continues to exist in the present. That this, too, will inevitably become an endlessly hardened past, and that any understanding of "it" can only end up mixed with my own arbitrariness and countless misunderstandings, feels both self-evident and disheartening.

The work of recording "it," of recording "that person," mimics the process of coming to understand something. The distortion that arises when tracing the branch of a living tree that changes daily, the subtle warping that appears when writing down a person we think we know well and then rereading that text — these confront us, beyond the sheer imperfection of memory and understanding, with the naked face of an "understanding" built only through a relative process of editing. How different is my "it" from that person's "it"? A clear, unmediated presence of the object may ultimately be impossible, but all I can do is keep tracing some point between it and myself, within that relationship, and keep discovering understanding there.

— Seongu Kang

- **Exhibiting artist** — Seongu Kang - **Venue** — SOOHOH GALLERY (2F G-24, The Sharp Star Park Shopping Mall, 121 Jeongja-il-ro, Bundang-gu) - **Inquiries** — 031-713-0287