Ik-Joong Kang

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 three-inch-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.

 

 

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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 mixed-media 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.

 

 

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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 multi-media 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.  "I just open my mind.  I try to let ideas follow me.  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.  I climb one and see there is another one to climb."  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.  More time was consumed going to classes at Pratt Institute in Fort Greene.  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 great-grandfather.  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.  "So I can see how time passes away."  One of Kang's favorite paintings reads: "My painting is good for memory."

 

 

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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.

 

 

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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.  "I saw Borovsky's shit."  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.  Flowers and dragonflies. A fleet of bombers flying over a mountain toward a metropolis.  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.  Cupped in his palm, a painting may be made with anything at hand.  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.  Afoot anywhere, Kang can work while walking on the street or standing in subways.  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.  From each monitor, a single sound issues.  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.  But the center seems also to be every point at which tones and images intersect.  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.  Kang, born in Seoul, now lives and works in New York.  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.  But the geographical and temporal origins in his harmonies are deliberately diverse.  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.  To convey the uneasy juxtaposition, he consistently uses humor and irony.  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."  Even the confession "I don't know what to paint" or observation at close range.  "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.  Was Kang with me at Broadway and 75th Street that day last spring?  Did he see, as I did, the dead woman taken from the wreck?  Does he contemplate the fates that slow our steps toward safety?

 

 

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