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Exhibition Catalog / 1996
Life as a Huge Mosaic
Hak Go Jae Galllery, Seoul, Korea

Yi, Joo-Heon

December in 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. Ik-Joong 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 cuisines.

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 eye-catching 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 encounters-karma, 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 powerful men of the art world, it is nothing unless it appeals as ‘something’ to the pure eyes of the young 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 ‘bibimbap.’

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 ‘bibimbap’ 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.

Sunday Star-Ledger/ December 9, 1990
Exhibit features thousands of pocket-sized paintings
Montclair State University, NJ

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 often it 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.

Reviews / June 27, 1996
365 Days of English, Contemporary Art Forum
Santa Barbara, CA

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, 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 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-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 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 Yi 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.

Exhibition Catalog / 2002
Cologne Pagoda and Other Works
National Museum of Asian Art, Berlin, Germany

Uta Rahman-Steinert

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 3×3 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 book-page. 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 still-existing 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.

Multiple / Dialogue ∞ (Nam June Paik / Ik-Joong Kang) 2009
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea

Eugenie Tsai

The exhibition “Multiple Dialogue ∞” presents an ideal opportunity to look back at the initial pairing of the artists Nam June Paik and Ik-Joong Kang in the exhibition “Multiple/Dialogue” that I organized in 1994 at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion. My idea was to pair compelling work by a young artist with that of an established artist in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The result was “Multiple/Dialogue,” a dramatic installation of 20,000 3 x 3-inch canvases by Kang — sound paintings, woodcuts, paintings of Buddha, and word drawings — alongside Paik’s video pieces V-yramid, Cage in Cage, and Buddha Watching TV. The work by these two artists covered nearly every square inch of the walls, from floor to ceiling. Both Kang and Paik attended the festive opening celebration which featured Sang-Won Park performing on the kayakeoum.

“Multiple/Dialogue” took place at a particular moment in the art world in the early 1990s when museums and galleries demonstrated a new openness and receptivity to presenting the work of artists from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. At the Whitney Museum, David Ross, director at that time, strongly encouraged the curators to take a fresh look at what it meant to be an American artist and to organize exhibitions like “Multiple/Dialogue” that would expand the museum’s mission.

I first encountered Ik-Joong Kang’s small but energetic 3 x 3-inch canvases around 1990. A young Korean-born artist, he had taken up residence in New York in 1984 to pursue his MFA at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. A typical student who needed to make ends meet, Kang held several part-time jobs, spending many hours on the subway commuting between far flung corners of the city’s five boroughs. Imaginative and industrious, he came up with the format of the 3 x 3-inch canvas which he could put in his pocket and pull out when he was in transit. His small canvases were like pages in a stream of consciousness journal on which he could record thoughts and observations from the continuum of his daily life. Employing a variety of media and techniques ranging from ball point pen drawings, to English phrases inscribed in bold letters, to objects glued onto the canvas, Kang made thousands of canvases, as though he was attempting to channel the energy he found on the streets. The canvases pulsed with the rhythm of the city.

I sensed a kinship between Kang and his older well known countryman Nam June Paik which had nothing to do with their chosen medium. Educated in Asia and in Europe, where he embraced avant-garde art and music, Paik moved to New York in 1964 and became one of the first artists to explore the potential of television and video as forms of art. The subject of a solo exhibition in 1982 at the Whitney Museum, his signature piece V-yramid became part of the Whitney’s collection. At that time, he enjoyed the distinction of being the only Asian-born artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum. While initially Kang and Paik might appear to be an unexpected pairing, they share a non-hierarchical approach to making art in which anything, even things and circumstances that others might consider inconsequential, can provide inspiration. As artist Byron Kim aptly observed: “I think of Kang and Paik as a recently evolved breed of city monk picking up wisdom at every storefront and depositing it at every subway stop.” Their democratic approach to content is reflected in their decision to work with a unit — a television monitor or a canvas — knowing that the unit can exist as a self contained entity and play a part in producing a larger undifferentiated whole.

When I first met Kang, I was delighted to learn of his admiration — even reverence — for Paik’s approach to art-making, which he felt he shared. Kang told me that Paik likened his art to the Korean dish bibimbap which calls for the cook to “throw everything together and add” (the title, incidentally, of Kang’s 1994 installation at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco). This attitude toward cooking and making art is one of openness and flexibility, of accepting and taking advantage of whatever is available. As long as there is rice, an inventive cook can transform bits of meat and vegetables — even leftovers from last night’s dinner — into a delicious bibimbap. In a similar fashion, as long as Paik has television monitors and Kang has canvases, each can transform their experiences of the world into art. Both Kang and Paik believe in the adage “the more the better” (the title of Paik’s 1988 video tower made on the occasion of the summer Olympic Games in Seoul). Abundance is a way of showing and sharing a spirit of generosity.

After “Multiple/Dialogue,” whenever Kang would run into Paik on the streets of New York, Paik would say “Let’s have a show together in Korea.” But he never specified when such an event might take place. Then, three years ago the renowned master passed away. Now fifteen years after “Multiple/Dialogue,” Paik and Kang are reunited, this time in Seoul on the momentous occasion of “Multiple Dialogue ∞” at the National Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition encompasses two major works: Paik’s spectacular video installation The More the Better and Kang’s equally spectacular mixed media installation Climbing the Mountain. Both works are on long term view at the museum.

“Multiple Dialogue ∞” marks two events of great significance: the third anniversary of Paik’s death and the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the National Museum of Contemporary Art. With this exhibition, Kang pays final tribute to Paik, who has played a significant role as an influential and inspirational figure in his artistic development. By presenting these two distinguished artists from different generations, the National Museum of Contemporary Art showcases the importance and vitality of contemporary art in Korea. For the opening celebration of “Multiple Dialogue ∞,” Sang Won Park once again performs, along with the dancer Na-Ye Kim. In a ritual dedicated to Paik, Kang makes bibimbap to share with all of the guests, a gesture that enables him to reach out posthumously to his teacher, to “wake him up” from his eternal slumber.

Much has changed in the intervening years between the two Multiple Dialogue exhibitions. Now very well known around the world, Kang was one of two artists to represent Korea in the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997. He received a special merit award for his exhibition at the Korean Pavilion. His installation included 6000 sound paintings that the Whitney Museum acquired after “Multiple/Dialogue.” In addition to his studio work, Kang has received numerous public art commissions and undertaken ambitious collaborative projects involving the participation of children from many countries around the globe. In 1993, Paik had represented Germany in the 45th Venice Biennale for which he received one the prestigious Golden Lion awards. Further burnishing his reputation, in 2000, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, presented “The Worlds of Nam June Paik,” a retrospective exhibition that celebrated the artist’s major contributions to the field of video art and new media. Recently, the Nam June Paik Art Center, dedicated to his life and legacy opened in Youngin, Kyungki Do. Multiculturalism of the 1990s has given way to globalism of the twenty-first century, with a new understanding and acceptance that we are all citizens of the world. With artistic roots and professional relationships in many different countries including Germany, the US, and Korea, Paik and Kang are two outstanding examples of this phenomenon.

“Multiple Dialogue ∞” takes as a point of departure Paik’s The More the Better created at the National Museum of Contemporary Art on the occasion of the 1988 Olympic Games. A tiered tower, which rises to a point, it occupies a specially designed space encircled by a ramp — a “mini Guggenheim” — that allows visitors to ascend alongside this imposing structure to its apex of 60 feet. Composed of 1003 television monitors in graduated sizes, a number that refers to the date of Korean liberation, Paik affectionately nicknamed this ziggurat “the wedding cake.” According to Paul Garrin, who worked on the piece, it is the largest video installation ever made by Paik and possibly “the largest ever made on the planet.” Although the monitors, turned out towards the visitors, appear to be simply stacked one on top of the other, they are supported by a steel framework. In fact, “The More the Better” could be regarded as a gigantic vessel. A doorway opens onto a hollow interior that houses a steel armature, electronic equipment, and a large cooling system. Like a body, the organs that keep the system running are hidden inside. Rapidly pulsing images that flash across the television monitors appear to dematerialize the surface of this structure in contrast to the stability of its massive volume. Through these images the cacophony of the world enters the rarified space of the museum.

The images flickering on the screens of The More the Better are an internal mix of three channels that create a constant barrage of changing shapes and colors. These images, remixed from other existing tapes with footage from Korea and other sources, are punctuated by a video wall on the fourth channel that plays an edited version of Wrap Around the World that first aired on PBS. Continuing Paik’s ambitions for live global satellite broadcasting evident in Bye Bye Kipling (1986), Wrap Around the World explores the possibilities of using this technique to link performances that were taking place in different studios around the world. With the participation of ten countries and stars from the realms of pop and the avant-garde including David Bowie, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Merce Cunningham, the result was a kaleidoscopic collage of cultural images. The tape incorporates footage of traditional drumming and dancing that took place at National Museum of Contemporary Art on the opening day of The More the Better. Garrin, to whom Paik had entrusted the video programming, attributes the spectacular presence of The More the Better to the candy-striped effect of a diagonal line spirals dynamically up the screens of the entire tower. He created this effect in Paik’s studio on a video synthesizer assembled from a patchwork of electronic equipment that manipulated the video signal. A preparatory drawing mapping the four channels demonstrates the significance the overall pattern of images played in Paik’s concept of the piece. In general, Paik’s approach was to create information overload by making the tapes as dense as possible. In some cases the images change 60 times a second. With the arrival of the digital age in which instantaneous information and sampling are taken for granted, it is clear that Paik was far ahead of his time. He was a visionary.

The More the Better grows out of large scale video installations that Paik initiated in the 1970s, with works such as TV Garden (1974) and Fish Flies on Sky (1975). These installations activate the architectural spaces they occupy creating a total environment. Like V-yramid (1982) which looks back to ancient Egyptian monuments, it refers to an historical architectural form. The More the Better also relates to his video wall structures from the mid-80s, in which monitors compose a matrix that can juxtapose images from multiple channels or function as modules in a larger image.

After he was invited to present his work at the National Museum of Contemporary art, Kang thought long and hard about The More the Better and concluded that this contemporary video installation draws on aspects of traditional forms and rituals. The tiered structure of Paik’s sculpture, for example, can be compared to Samcheungseoktap, an ancient three-story stone pagoda of the sort found near Buddhist temples, such as the Seokga pagoda on the grounds of the Bulguksa Temple. On special occasions including the New Year, monks and visitors circle around the pagoda in walking meditation, an act of devotion, in the hope of receiving a blessing. This ritual, known as topdori provides a means of communication between the earth and the heavens. Kang also notes that temples and pagodas are silhouetted against mountains, a scene frequently depicted in Korean landscape paintings. Characteristically, visitors to a temple precinct must hike up through rocky terrain to reach their destination.

Inspired by the iconic image of a pagoda set in the mountains and the ritual of topdori, for “Multiple Dialogue ∞,” Kang produced Climbing the Mountain a multi-media tour de force that employs, image, sound, and visitor participation. A landscape assembled from 70,000 works drawn from his artistic repertory of the past twenty years, it wraps around Paik’s high-tech pagoda. Climbing the Mountain fills the entire 540-foot-long wall adjacent to the ramp (with ceiling heights ranging from 11 to 23 feet) as it winds up and around The More the Better. From a distance, Kang’s wall establishes a backdrop, a stable grid of colored squares that mirrors the modular structure of Paik’s tower while providing a slow, low-tech counterpoint to the rapidly pulsing images on the screens. Kang’s mountain echoes Cheong Gye San, which stands behind the museum.

Our experience of Climbing the Mountain begins at the foot of the ramp with wax facsimiles of bibimbop from different regions, alluding to restaurants and noodle shops situated at the foot of the mountain where visitors might fortify themselves before setting off. As the ascent begins, Kang’s canvases reveal their remarkable diversity, although they all fit into the category of nature in its broadest sense: Sam Ra Man Sang — “everything under the heavens.”

Images of a traditional Korean moon-shaped jar represent Kang’s most recent work. According to the artist, the moon jar, first made during the Choseun dynasty, is appreciated for its simplicity, which is like the sky. Two hemispherical halves formed out of white clay are joined before they are fired in a kiln to create the vessel. No two moon jars are alike; the imperfections of shape and surface make each one unique. The symbolism of bringing together opposites appeals to Kang, who contemplates the many possibilities: north and south; day and night; past and future; plus and minus; and empty and full. In the artist’s lexicon, moon jars seem to represent the world of dreams and aspirations. Inspiration for this motif arrived unexpectedly in 2004, while Kang was collaborating with children on Moon of Dream, a project in Ho Su Park, Il San, Kyungki Do. An enormous inflated sphere covered with 126,000 children’s drawings floated on the surface of the lake. Due to a slight defect, the sphere bulged more on one side, reminding the artist of a moon jar’s distinctive shape.

With his paintings of the moon jar, Kang began to diverge from his trademark 3 x 3-inch canvases, sometimes employing a larger format of 24 x 24, 30 x 30, and 72 x 72 inches. Rendered in tempera, the paintings are sanded before polymer compound is applied as a sealant. The painted images reflect the same subtle differences in shape and color that are found in their ceramic counterparts. Moon jars also appear on the sides of eight 2 x 2-foot cubes (2008). Mounted on the wall, the projecting cubes mimic the appearance of large rocks. The chanting of Buddhist monks emanates from speakers concealed inside. Roughly 2000 miniature ceramic moon jars (2008) sit on small shelves extending out of some of the paintings. Laptop speakers contained within the jars and connected to mp3 players play the sounds of birds calling, water flowing and falling, and wind blowing, all elements of Korean landscape painting. The sounds were collected from mountains in Korea. Here Kang integrates up-to-the-minute technology and ancient tradition, as Paik had earlier.

The image of the moon has been associated with Paik since his famous piece Moon is the Oldest TV (1965), twelve television monitors that appear to show the waxing and waning of the moon. He achieved this effect by modifying the cathode ray tubes to show a subtle circle of light. With characteristic humor, Paik comments on the interplay between technology, time, and the cosmos.

In some sections of the wall, Kang intersperses moon jar paintings with pieces from a series called Mountain/Wind (2007) that portray schematic images of mountains brushed with meok on square blocks of wood scavenged from packing pallets. The combination of moon jar and mountain suggests heaven and earth, a theme Kang explored in his 2007 government commission for the Kwang Hwa Gate of the Gyeongbok Palace in central Seoul. Entitled Mountain and Wind, this mural stands in front of the Kwang Hwa Gate, screening it from view while it undergoes reconstruction. Composed of two walls, the smaller, made up of a matrix of moon jars, projects from the surface the larger. Overlaying the matrix is the distinctive silhouette of the gate as it will appear after its completion. This is achieved by the illumination of 1000 LED lights situated in the 3-foot gap between the two walls. The second wall consists of a grid made up of Mt. Inwan, the famous landmark behind the palace complex. The images of the moon jar and mountain depicted in Mountain and Wind are echoed by the surrounding landscape itself with heaven and earth joined into single universe. At night the murals glow like a Buddhist temple as the bulbs change colors — blue, red, yellow, white, and black — inspired by Dan chung. Mountain and Wind is one of Kang’s major commissions in public places, along with the San Francisco International Airport, California; the Princeton Public Library, New Jersey; and the Metropolitan Transit Authority subway station in Flushing, New York.

In addition to pieces from Mountain/Wind, the wall includes examples from the eclectic mix of works Kang calls Happy World (the title of his 1998 installation in the MTA Flushing Main Street Station, New York). Included are small paintings on stretched canvas dating back to the 1980s, as well as more recent paintings on wood sealed with polymer compound. Red and blue ink drawings from the early 1990s, composed of vocabulary words from the Graduate Record Exam study guide, hang in close proximity to the brightly hued English vocabulary paintings on wood made later in the decade. Both reveal Kang’s approach to his second language as a system of meaning to master and a series of abstract forms to visually manipulate. A selection of woodcuts from “Multiple/Dialogue” appears on the wall, along with Buddha paintings, and paintings with attached objects. Kang’s multimedia installation includes mirrors mounted on the wall, and poong kyung, wind chimes hanging from the ceiling. The sounds they emit are evidence of invisible natural forces. Also in the mix are mementos from the artist’s family including his mother’s pedal organ, an instrument she played throughout his childhood, and toys his son played with when he was very young. As visitors continue to ascend the ramp, they come across a spring, another element found in Korean landscape painting. Further on, they encounter a platform where they can pause to admire the view and wave to friends. Microphones on the platform allow visitors to shout “ya-ho” to fellow travelers above and below, their voices echoing throughout the space. A camera trained on the microphone captures their faces, projecting them in wall-mounted digital frames. .

When visitors finally reach the very top of the ramp they encounter a dramatic waterfall fabricated from word drawings that Kang showed in “Multiple/Dialogue.” Laminated together, these drawings form 23-foot-long strips that are bundled together to create a unique screen onto which an image of a waterfall is projected. Strategically-aimed fans cause the water to ripple. The unspoken words in the drawings fall silently toward the floor below, in contrast to the audible chanting of the Buddhist monks and shouting of visitors making their way up the ramp. Upon reaching their destination, visitors can stop and reflect on their climb up Kang’s mountain and the ritual of circling around Paik’s pagoda. A trip through “Multiple Dialogue ∞” brings to mind the universal experience of life’s journey and the quest to attain spiritual enlightenment.

Like two halves of a moon jar, Paik’s The More the Better and Kang’s Climbing the Mountain come together to form a single entity. “Multiple Dialogue ∞” takes the collaboration initiated by “Multiple/Dialogue” to another level of ambition and complexity, scaling ever greater heights. A tribute to Paik as well as to Kang, the whole is much greater than the sum of two halves. “Multiple Dialogue ∞” underscores the many conversations that can take place between two artists of different generations and between tradition and artistic innovation, all coalescing seamlessly in this exhibition. “Multiple Dialogue ∞” offers proof that in the hands of masters “throw everything together and add” and “the more the better” can result in memorable moments and lasting monuments to artistic inspiration.

Eugenie Tsai
John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art
Brooklyn Museum

Exhibition Catalogue / 1999
Buddha Learning English
Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Eugenie Tsai

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 three-by-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-four-hundred-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 Millennium, Kang is looking toward the future.

Multiple Dialogue / 1994
Nam June Paik and Ik-Joong Kang
Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion

Eugenie Tsai

Recently, I met Ik-Joong Kang, an artist in his mid-thirties, for the lunch at one of the many Korean restaurants that have recently sprung up in the west Thirties near Herald Square in Manhattan. We ordered bibimbap, a dish Kang had mentioned in an earlier discussion concerning the art of Nam June Paik, one of Kang’s heroes. Two sizzling stoneware bowls arrived at the table filled with finely shredded vegetables and meat arranged in separate sections on top of rice. After we added hot sauce, Kang instructed me to stir everything together with a large spoon before digging in. I had asked him to order bibimbap thinking its presence before me would clarify its connection in Kang’s thought to the art of Paik, but at the end of the delicious meal, I was still puzzled and turned to Kang for enlightenment.

Kang, Whose admiration for Paik dates back to his adolescences in Korea, fells that he and his old compatriot share a similar approach to art making. He recalls an interview he saw on Korean television in the mid-eighties, in which Paik compared his way of making art to bibimbap. This dish has traditionally consisted of rice mixed with bits of meat, fish, vegetables, seasonings-whatever was on hand. Although the permutations of dish are infinite, the underlying constant is rice. Kang likens Paik’s art and his own to bibimbap (translated roughly a ‘mixing rice’), which requires the cook to “throw everything together and add”- the title of Kang’s recent installation at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco. The cook who prepares bibimbap exhibits a flexibility and openness to everything, within a given structure.

“Multiple/Dialogue” pairs the work of Paik, the sixty-two-year-old pioneer of video art, and Kang, a painter some thirty years Paik’s junior. The paring 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. Both artists regard their adopted culture from the distinctive perspectives of Korean-born immigrants who survey the ebb and flow of their environment with a perpetual sense of wonder and bemusement. Their observations display similar wit, cleverness, and self-deprecatory humor. The work of both id organized by modular units that build up to a larger whole. Characteristically, Paik stacks a number of television monitors, big and small, into various configurations, whereas Kang aligns thousands of 3 x 3-inch canvases to form an orderly grid. Both artists subscribe to the edge “the more the better” (the title, incidentally, of Paik’s piece at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games), believing that an accretion of multiples best captures the vast undifferentiated field of contemporary life. In the analogy between Korean cuisine and the art of Paik and Kang, the modular structure is clearly the shared constant, the given that organizes the miscellaneous images and incidents from life. In short, Paik and Kang throw everything and add. A luminary in the international world of video art, Nam June Paik began his career as an aspiring musician and composer: Born in Korea in 1932, he left with his family for Hong Kong at the outset of the Korean War: From 1953 through 1956, Paik studied music, art history, and philosophy at the University of Tokyo, where he graduated with a thesis on the composer Arnold Schonberg. He then traveled to Germany to pursue his interest in avant-garde music, enrolling first at the University of Munich. Soon after, he settled in Cologne, where he worked with experimental musician Karlheinz Stockhausen and performed at the studio of artist Mary Bauermeister. During these years, Paik also met two individuals who would play significant roles in shaping his artistic concerns: composer John Cage and artist George Maciunas.

Paik’s performance of Homage a John Cage: Music for tape Recorder and Piano in Dusseldorf in 1959, the year after Paik and Cage met, is evidence of the Korean artist’s esteem for Cage. The improvisatory nature of the piece, as recollected by Ernst Thomas, was entirely consistent with Cage’s embrace of randomness and chance operations:

In this “music” for tape recorders and piano the most bizarre things happen in five minutes: there are howls of electronic noise, eggs splash against the wall, a motorbike clatters off, a musical box tinkles, the radio blares out political news, Paik plays Czerny-like exercise on the piano, a rosary files past my head, an old piano has to produce its last sounds on strings that have been torn out, then it is hurled over with a thunderous noise; suddenly there is silence and complete darkness, and finally Paik’s unyielding force, illuminated by a stump of candle.1

Another interaction with cage occurred the following year at Paik’s performance of Etude for piano forte, during which Paik jumped unexpectedly into the audience where Cage was seated and cut the composer’s shirt and tie with scissors.

In 1961 Paik met George Maciunas, one of the founders of Fluxus, “a loose, anarchic association of artists who, in actions, exhibitions, compositions and manifestos, created a rebellious alliance against perceived institutions and trends in high culture.”2 The following year, Paik performed Zen for Head at a Fluxus international Festival for very New Music in Wiesbaden. In this performance, Paik dipped his head, hands, and necktie into a bowl of ink and tomato juice, and dragged them along a long narrow sheet of paper. The absurdity and performance nature of this gesture were typical of Fluxus.

Paik began to produce objects only in 1963, the year of his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. The exhibition, which included three altered pianos and thirteen television sets with images scrambled by manipulated cathode-ray tubes, marked the beginning of the artist’s experimentation with television as a medium. At the opening, one of the pianos was attacked by artist Joseph Beuys wielding an ax. This improvised action suggests that although Paik had begun to produce actual objects, they were sometimes impermanent and unstable, more like expendable props in temporal performances.

After his move to New York on 1964, Paik’s experimentation with the medium of television expanded into the new realm of video recorders sold, and that same day, filmed Pope Paul VI’s visit to New York. The footage was shown that evening at Café a Go-Go. Later that year, Paik’s first videotape recorder installation was presented in “Electronic Art” at Gallery Bonino in New York. Throughout the seventies, Paik’s videos became more technically sophisticated, and he was eventually able to program multi-channel over a spectrum of monitors.

Paik’s V-yramid (1982) a ziggurat constructed from forty television consoles of gradually diminishing dimensions, is the outgrowth of two decades of experimentation with the medium of television and video. The monument draws visual parallels between the ancient age of pyramid and the modern age of media, paying tribute to the state-of-art technology in the respective eras that produced these innovations. The television monitors into a montage of discrete, pulsating kaleidoscopic fields whose shapes and colors constantly change in time to a “found” soundtrack. In keeping with Paik’s global outlook, the soundtrack includes rock and roll and traditional Korean music. The abstract images of V-yramid are comparable to the manipulated televisions of 1963, but here the pictorial effects are achieved by a technological advance: a synthesizer developed by Paik and engineer Shuya Abe.

As in V-yramid, the images that materialized on the nine small screens of Cage in Cage (1993) create an ever-changing montage. Here the images are recognizable; footage of Cage slowly cuts or dissolves to Buddha in the snow, alluding to Cage’s knowledge and love of Asian culture. The meditative aspect of the work is reinforced by the absence of sound. Cage in Cage, made the year after the composer’s death, is one in a series of pieces that pay final tribute to Cage. The title and the large multistoried birdcage which houses the video monitors are verbal and visual puns on Cage brought a Westerner’s eye to a sustained interest in the East, Paik has done just the opposite.

The meditative quality of Cage in Cage is also found in Buddha Watching TV (1994), theme taken up in the mid-seventies. A seated statue of Buddha contemplates a television on which its own image appears. This evocative piece suggests multiple associations: the trance induced by meditation as compared to the stupor induced by watching television: the self, and the representation and perception of self; the juxtaposition of a tradition associated with the ancient East with the up-to-the-minute technological West. Of course, with the recent technological hegemony of the East, perhaps the Juxtaposition has become one of the East past and present.

Nineteen-sixty, the year Paik jumped into the audience during hid performance of Etude for piano Fore and cut Cage’s tie and shirt, was the year Ik-Joong Kang was born in Cheong Ju. Kang received his BFA from Hong-Ik University in Seoul in 1984, with training in Korean brush painting and the European tradition of abstract painting. Upon his arrival in New York soon after graduation, he enrolled at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he was awarded his MFA in 1987. Kang developed the 3 x 3-inch format he still favors during his days as a student. This format developed outside the classroom, however, in response to practical necessity. An impoverished student, Kang worked a twelve-hour day at Korean grocery store in Manhattan and as a watchman at a flea market in Far Rockaway, Queens. Looking for ways to effectively utilize time spent on the long subway ride to Far Rockaway, he discovered that 3-inch-square canvases fit easily into his pockets and into the palm of his hand. His lengthy commute became transformed into work time in a mobile studio. The paintings produced by Kang at this time were diaristic and immediate, recording momentary thoughts, fantasies, observations, and reactions to the events of everyday life. Although the artist calls these paintings, they are more accurately characterized as mixed-media works, for they often include words, drawings, and objects affixed to canvases.

The 3 x 3-inch format was convenient and, as Kang notes, corresponds to the distance between our eyes. In addition, the particular associations these dimensions hold in Asian cultures appealed to the artist. Kang points to shoji screens composed of 3-inch squares, the perfect size in Zen thought, and to wooden containers from which sake traditionally is drunk. His miniature canvases, which fit into palm, conform to an Asian belief that what is revealed in the palm reflects what is in the mind. The artist also recalls a scene from a Japanese movie, Blind Shogun, in which a samurai warrior observes the landscapes through a small square “frame” formed by putting the soles of his wooden platform sandals together. In this sense, Kang’s painting can be regarded as an Asian equivalent of the Italian Renaissance concept of painting as a window opening onto a coextensive world.

The several thousand paintings in “Multiple/Dialogue,” representing a decade of Kang’s work, have remained constant in size and imagery. They continue to address personal obsessions and fantasies, and to ponder cosmic questions-the meaning of life and death, the roles of the spiritual and carnal-along with the more mundane: bodily functions and insular New York art world. The paintings continue to make use of written notations, aphorisms, caricatured and cartoon-like images, and found objects collaged onto the surfaces of canvases. Kang’s method of working, however, has been slightly altered. He no longer creates on the subway but in a tiny studio, and his paintings often reflects events and non-events observed on his daily walks between his home in the Chelsea district of Manhattan and his studio just below Canal Street.

“Multiple/Dialogue” includes work dating back to Kang’s first exhibition in New York in 1986 at the new defunct Two Two Raw Gallery. There, seated in a tent-like structure for ten-hours a day. Five days a week, the artist made paintings. Over the course the one-month “living” performance, he produced a thousand paintings and hung them randomly on the walls. In 1988, Kang adopted a regular grid format in his installation of 6,000 canvases in Broad Windows. Two years later, the element of sound was introduced in “Ssound Paintings” at Montclair College. Of the 7,0000 paintings on view, 2,000 had small speakers imbedded in the back. The aural component corresponded to the four elements of traditional Korean landscapes painting: water (the sound of the ocean); mountain (birds); clouds (thunderstorm); trees (wind). Performance, the grid, and sound continue to be the basic components of his work.

Kang initiated a series of woodcuts in 1991. His original motivation was to make art for the visually impaired; he intended to send them to his father in Korea, who had lost his sight as a result of diabetes. Like the paintings, the woodcut respond to the ephemera of everyday life and are often based on quick sketches made by Kang on the daily walks between his home and studio. However, they are more laborious to make than the paintings and demand a great degree of patience, physical endurance, and mental focus. Kang likens the woodcut to “casting an ides in bronze,” implying a commitment to an idea in a more permanent material that calls for a time-consuming process.

A series of drawings from 1992 is devoted solely to the written word-English vocabulary Kang obtained from a study guide for the Graduate record Examination. The English phrases are written in red and the Korean equivalent in blue. These colors on white graph paper give the drawings the appearance of an American flag. The drawings call attention to the materiality of language, which becomes especially evident when it is unfamiliar. As any traveler will attest, an unknown foreign language becomes a concrete entity that veils ideas.

The 1992-1994 series of paintings, Buddha Learning English, differs from Kang’s other work in that it uses traditional Asian iconography. Based on the artist’s memories of childhood visit to Buddhist temples, the paintings represent the single iconic image of a seated Buddha. An audiotape of the artist reciting phrases in English culled from recent magazines, newspapers, and books accompanies these images. The activity of Buddha rehearsing English phrases out loud t o perfect pronunciation is one Kang identifies with. The juxtaposition of image and word, however, suggests that the Buddha is a metaphor not only for Asian culture but for Buddha’s openness to the West, an orientation that also parallels that of the artist.

Kang has continued the practice of displaying huge numbers of his paintings and woodcuts in neatly arranged grids. “Multiple/Dialogue” includes approximately 20,000 works. East time he installs his canvases and woodcuts, he rewrites and revises his own history, for no two installations are identical. The vast undifferentiated grid records transitory moments in the continuum of Kang’s life, yet these are displayed randomly, with no single moment regarded as more significant than another. The canvases and woodcuts are also recontextualized by what hangs above, below, and to either side, and by the audiotape component.

Although Paik and Kang are omnivorous consumers of the sights and sounds of popular culture, their work differs in significant ways that are related to their media. Paik’s altered televisions subvert straight programming by commercial television stations. In this way, he critiqued television at a moment in the early sixties when it was becoming a fixture in American households. In a similar fashion, his videos, by recycling material pirated from actual programs or from his own work and incorporating it into a montage without a linear narrative undercut the premises of television as “reality” framed-an updated version of the Renaissance notion of painting. Here Clement Greenberg, the renowned critic of the sixties, comes to mind, with his belief about using the characteristic nature of a medium as a mean to criticize and purify it and thereby affirm its area of competence. 3 Although Greenberg would have regarded video as outside the boundaries of art, Paik’s systematic exploration of the unique video as outside the boundaries of art, Paik’s systematic exploration of the unique characteristics presented by video as a medium belongs to the same critical moment.

In contrast, Kang’s chosen medium is the traditional paint on canvas, with its emphasis on the mark of the artist. The themes in his paintings are, not surprisingly, personal; regarded as a whole, his installations reveal his most intimate thoughts. But they are structured, like Paik’s video, in a non-linear sequence. In this respect, they too can be regarded as a critique of the grand tradition of history painting as it originated in Renaissance Italy and culminated in the work of such nineteenth-century French artists as Jacques-Louis David and Eugene Delacroix. Each one of Kang’s paintings is clearly modest. The grand gesture lies in the overwhelming number on view at any one moment.

Some of the distinctions between the work of Paik and Kang can be attributed to the artistic priorities of different generations. In Paik’s work, the artist’s touch is nowhere in evidence. The subject is not the artist but the media of television and video. The work represents the ethos of the sixties, which advocated the effacement of the artist through the use of industrial materials and fabrication, and the deployment of uniform modules associated with assembly-line production. Kang’s paintings and woodcuts, like the work of many other artists who began in the late eighties and early nineties, reintroduce the autobiographical. Although he too employs a standardized module, each 3 x 3-inch canvas is personal, stretched and painted by hand. The artist’s presence is clearly visible in the line and brushstrokes, his voice is audible on tape.

With the decision to use the armature of the grid, Paik and Kang also join an art historical dialogue. Throughout the twentieth century, the deployment of the grid in Europe and the US was commonly regarded by artists and critics as a self-effacing gesture, a way to erase the artist’s presence and to declare the distance separating art from the everyday world. Rosalind Krauss wrote:

In the spatial sense, the grid states the absolute autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, order, it is anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.4

Although Paik manipulates television monitors to form a matrix, his use of media imagery transgresses the boundary of “high art” into the territory of popular, where it pulsates with life.

The dialogue initiated here between Paik and Kan extends beyond their work, becoming a dialogue between life and art, different artistic traditions, and different generations. What unifies the dialogue is the quest of both artists to capture and comment upon all that is elusive in the continuum of contemporary life.

Godzilla / 1992
Ik-Joong Kang 3 x 3, Queens Museum, NY

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 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 inconsequential. 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.

Exhibition Catalog / 1996
8490 Days Of Memory
Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris

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 objects 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. MacArthur, 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.

IK-JOONG KANG
Flash Art 282 January – February 2012

Nicola Trezzi

CREATIVITY CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT UNCERTAINTY

NICOLA TREZZI: You moved to New York in 1984, but when we went to Korea together I had the sense that you go back often and you are very attached to the community. How did your work develop since you moved to the US?

Ik-Joong Kang: Upon my arrival in New York, I enrolled at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. There, I developed the three-by-three-inch format during my days as a student. It was developed primarily outside the classroom, in response to my practical necessity at the time. I was an impoverished student, working 12 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, I discovered that three-inch-square canvases fit easily into my pockets and into the palm of my hand. My lengthy commute became transformed into work time in a mobile studio. These miniature canvases functioned like pages in a diary upon which I recorded my immediate responses to life in a foreign city. I thought it would be cool to show these thousands of “three-by-three moments” of my life as a single installation someday. Three years ago, 62,000 works of art were shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea under the title Multiple Dialogue Infinity (2004). My artwork surrounded a gigantic tower consisting of 1,003 television monitors created by Nam June Paik. As for my trips to Korea, I’ve just earned 1,000,000 airline miles, which gives me a right to eat a free meal at the business-class lounge at Incheon Airport in Seoul. I guess that’s a sure sign that I fly a lot — especially to Korea.

IK-JOONG KANG, 25 Wishes, 2006. Tempera and polymer compound on wood, 290 x 290 cm. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Korean Gallery.

NT: The moon jar* is the subject of many of your works. When did you start working with this iconic object and why have you decided to use it so often?

I-JK: They say that the best things in life come unexpectedly, and the first moon jar paint¬ing was born unexpectedly. In 2004 I did a project called Moon of the Dream, a 15-meter-diameter globe balloon with 126,000 children’s drawings attached that was launched at this lake not far from the DMZ, the demilita¬rized border zone between North and South Korea. On the morning of the opening day I was shocked to see a somewhat deflated and unbalanced giant globe floating on the water. Accidentally we pumped too much air into the globe thinking we could get a perfectly round shape. But in doing so, the vinyl/canvas mate¬rial got ripped at one corner and the full-moon shape slowly became a deflated half moon. There was despair at first, but soon I saw a lovely shape in the deflated globe: a moon jar! Moon jar painting was born then. By the way, the globe was fixed just in time for the big opening. Nam June Paik once said that the moon was the earliest TV. It was the place of imagination and a playground. The Chinese poet Li Bai drowned when, sitting drunk in a boat, he tried to seize the moon’s reflection in the water. The moon was the place of im¬mortality and a connecting station to another world. The moon jar is the place where people store their dreams.

NT: You use the jar as both a sculptural ready¬made and as a subject for depiction. Your work 1,392 Moon Jars (Wind) (2008-10), which is part of the Guggenheim collection, consists of 1,392 glazed porcelain jars painted with enamel. What is the significance of this number?

I-JK: 1392 is the first year of the Joseon Dy¬nasty, out of which developed haff — the Korean alphabet — and the moon jar. Both inventions hold two important facts: yin and yang. With a combination of vowels and con¬sonants, each Hanguel makes a single sound, just as the attachment of top and bottom forms a whole moon jar.

Things I Know, 2010. Installation view at the Shang¬hai Expo Korean Pavilion, Shanghai. 40,000 aluminum pan¬els, 45 x 45 cm (each). Photo: Jeong Yul Lee. Both courtesy the artist, Alexander Ochs, Berlin, Gallery Huyndai, Seoul, Sabina Lee, Los Angeles and Carl Solway, Cincinnati (US).

NT: When we were in Korea together you had more than five projects around Seoul and an exhibition in Daegu. How do you approach the presentation of your work compared to your studio practice? Do you let the curator decide everything or do you like to be involved?

I-JK: It’s like a marriage between the curator and the artist. Good matchmaking is what makes a good show. I’m the kind of artist who can be extremely flexible in the process of installation as it relates to the actual space and presentation.

NT: Do you think your practice will become more and more monumental? Or will you keep things scaled down?

I-JK: It will grow bigger as children are grow¬ing taller. In this last one year alone, aside from my own exhibitions of my work, I had 12 different murals of children’s drawings installed at 12 hospitals and libraries in Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan and South Korea. Over 1,000 volunteers made these projects pos¬sible. Amazingly, these volunteers include prisoners, nursing home residents, soldiers and students of all ages.

NT: We went to a children’s museum in Ko¬rea where you had a big installation made in collaboration with kids. Tell me about these projects — why and when did you start work¬ing with children?

I-JK: I started collecting drawings by chil¬dren from 1997, a year before my son was born. As a child growing up in South Korea, I often heard stories from my elders about their lives in a Korea that was one single country. I remember how their eyes filled with the hope of once again embracing their long-lost family and friends. I thought build¬ing an actual bridge between the two Koreas with children’s drawings would be one way to unite the country. So I started sending letters to South Korean children first, say¬ing: “I would like to gather your dreams and show them in one place so everyone can see! What is your dream? Do you dream from the mountains? Maybe you dream from your home near the ocean, or city with tall buildings.” 100,000 Dreams (1999), my first project with children, was with 60,000 small children’s drawings of South Korea. It was installed inside a one-kilometer greenhouse in the wasteland of the South Korean demili¬tarized zone in 1999. Though North Korean children did not participate as planned, this project grew into Amazed World (2005) and Moon of Dream (2004). 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.

NT: Will you ever go back permanently to Korea? The art scene is experiencing a boom. What do you think of this renaissance?

I-JK: I am not so sure whether I will go back to Korea permanently. Although Korea is my home, I recently purchased a cemetery lot here in New York overlooking the At¬lantic Ocean. If I keep going east from the cemetery, I will land in Europe, China and eventually Korea. Anytime is the best time to visit the cemetery and lie down and see the skies and feel the winds. All is connected. Yes, Korea is a booming country. Its renais¬sance is due to the energetic young people who live there. Oh, and one more thing: compared to any other cities I’ve traveled, Seoul is chaotic enough to be creative and breathable. We call this Kimchi power!

IK-KOONG KANG, Moon of Dream, 2004. 126,000 children’s drawings from 149 Countries on vinyl and canvas Globe, 1500 cm ø. Photo: Jeong Yul Lee.

NT: What is the last dream you remember?

I-JK: I would become a bridge builder. The bridge will be laid over the Imjin River, which has been separating North and South Korea for more than a half century. In my dream, children’s dreams fill the bridge and anyone who walks on this bridge will be sent to the future without even having to buy a ticket. This is the bridge of past, present and future.

NT: Tell me about your friendship with Nam June Paik and Hyang An Kim.

I-JK: One of the luckiest things that happened to me in New York was meeting these two great Koreans — Nam June Paik and Hyang An Kim. They gave me great inspiration. I’ve always believed that life is like riding a train. We get on and get off. The person sitting next to you keeps changing as time goes by because everyone has different tickets with different destinations. I met them in the train and they sat next to me for a short period of their train ride. Eighteen years ago I was preparing a two-person exhibition with Nam June Paik at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Connecticut. From his resi¬dence in Düsseldorf, Nam June faxed a simple, two-sentence-long message, which read: “I am very flexible. It is very important that Ik-Joong has the better space.” One time Nam June and I were dining with people working in fi-nance, they were all amused at his insightful interpretation of minute-by-minute changes in Wall Street. Then they were all astonished as he asked, “What would the 30th-century world be like?” and smiled like a child. His pure smile is still vivid in me. I thought to myself, “I am pretty sure he is a shaman who sees stars even in daylight.” Years ago, Nam June was quoted in a Korean newspaper: “Uncertainty can exist without creativity. However, creativity cannot exist without uncertainty. We have not led the exhibition to serve cuisine to youth. We are presenting this tough show to give them [young Korean artists] strong teeth to break down any food.” Hyang An Kim was the wife of Whanki Kim, a pioneer and leading abstract artist in Korea. Their life together started in the early ’60s after Whanki Kim’s participa¬tion in the Bienal de São Paulo. One morn¬ing Madame Kim and I were sitting at a small coffee shop in Paris. She told me a story I will never forget: “Kang, there are three things you must remember in your life. First, never skip a breakfast. When your body doesn’t function well due to the lack of nutrition, you tend to use the shortcut and then you fall. Second, leave a big tip whenever you go to a restaurant or take a taxi. Always remember that people who serve you have a family to feed. Lastly, I don’t know whether you will understand this or not, but I’ll tell you anyway. You have to tell the difference between the opportunity and temptation.” I asked, “How?” She said, “Before you do something, always think first whether it is the right thing for history, people and the world. Don’t do it because it is for your own benefit. Most people bite the hook of temptation thinking it is their opportunity.”

Nicola Trezzi is US Editor of Flash Art International.

Ik-Joong Kang was born in 1960 in Cheong Ju, Korea. He lives and works in New York.

Selected solo shows: 2012: Sabina Lee, Los Angeles; 2011: POSCO Art Museum, Seoul, Korea; Wall of Hope, Jang An Gu Hospital, Suwon (KR); Sejong Center, Seoul. 2010: Alexander Ochs Gallery, Beijing; Gallery Hyundai, Seoul; Korean Pavilion, Shanghai Expo, Shanghai; Korean Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

*The traditional moon jar is a plain, white, round jar that originated in the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897). Because pottery makers use extra soft clay, the moon jar is carefully formed by shaping bottom and top halves separately. This process leaves imperfections, revealing the touch of the maker. These imperfections are considered part of the jar’s perfec¬tion — a symbol of oneness.

Amazed World, 2001-2002. 34,000 children’s drawings from over 120 countries, 8 x 8 cm (each). Installation view at the United Nations, New York; Happy World, 2009. Found ob¬jects, tempera, crayon and polymer compound on wood, 8 x 8 x 8 cm (each). All courtesy the artist, Alexander Ochs, Berlin, Gallery Huyndai, Seoul, Sabina Lee, Los Angeles and Carl Solway, Cincinnati (US).

Press Release, 2004,
Happy World at Princeton Public Library
Would you like to build a wall of peace?

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.”

Exhibition Catalog (Presence) / 2006
Buddha with Lucky Objects, 2004
The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY

Julien Robson

Ik-Joong Kang’s work sustains an impressive and surprising scale, through the simultaneity of both immense quantity and intimacy. His installations intuitively express a merging of cultures through the social, psychological, and artistic processes of accumulation, creating meditative spaces that reveal a personal history while transforming the everyday into the spiritual.

Buddha with Lucky Objects is a special installation that has been developed for Presence. Combining thousands of three-inch-square Buddha paintings with hundreds of small hanging objects collected from five-and-dime stores, this work synthesizes diverse cultures into a single environment.

Ik-Joong Kang reflects on impressions left when, as a child, he visited religious temples decorated with folk art in Korea. The rich traditions of Eastern faiths have lived to merge and change over centuries in Korea, and shamanism1, in particular, has survived there for over five millennia. As an elective New Yorker, Kang draws upon the traditions of shamanism that are still practiced today in his native country and merges them with the colorful plenty of his newfound home.

In Buddha with Lucky Objects, thousands of small, square paintings done on blocks of wood line the main wall. In front of this array is a circular enclosure whose back wall is painted gold, but whose interior is formed from the tiny Buddha paintings. Painted by hand with flat color and graphic symmetry, Kang’s Buddhas reference the tradition of Mudang paintings. These folk portraits of favorite deities are used by Korean shamans to create a sacred space in which to converse with spirits through dance and song. The image of the Buddha is used by shamans to symbolize the ultimate god.

Kang’s overwhelming abundance of Buddhas exaggerates the shaman’s ritual use of multiple portraits. The paintings would typically be made in sets of two, three, or four, each done by the same hand, and hung on the wall of the shaman’s sacred room, or Tang, until the shaman’s death. Faded or dusty Mudangs might be disposed of, requiring the Shaman to commission a new set, which would be considered equally effective.

In the circular enclosure, amidst this multiple presence of Buddhas, Kang introduces the type of cheap and colorful objects found in five-and-dime stores. These erratically hung, brightly colored material things of everyday life in the U.S. simulate the random and absurd abundance of goods experienced in any urban or suburban shopping spree. An overwhelming collection of prosaic clutter, it appears exotic in this defamiliarized space. The wonder and intrigue of American culture as seen through Kang’s eyes during his first years in Manhattan is reinvented for the viewer.

Kang, like the shaman who utilizes folk portraits in the Tang, invents a new and functional purpose for his collection of objects. A motion detector senses the viewer’s presence, in turn activating a fan that shakes the wall of the enclosure. With the viewer’s movement, the objects begin to rattle, producing a sound that reverberates within the cylindrical wall and recalling the shaking instrument used by Korean shamans in the spiritual ceremony called the Goot. In this ritual, the instrument generates a chanting sound so powerful that it can be heard from miles away. The Goot sound is believed to call the gods in times of need, and allow the shaman to converse with the spirits to interpret their messages for people of the earth.

In Kang’s installation, the viewer becomes the shaman whose movement actively engages the instrument that summons the spirits. And when the viewer settles and is still, the objects cease rattling, and the viewer becomes conscious of his or her power. Inside the installation, one confronts the world given life by the presence of the individual and, through looking and exploring, gains new insight into the environment and the self. Kang invites his audience to take control of the Tang, and to understand the significance of one’s own presence in the function and presence of the work of art.

The Village Voice / December 11, 1990
Throw Everything Together and Add
Montclair State University, NJ

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 cross-cultural 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?

The New York Times
September 18, 1994, From Korea
the Makings of a Dialogue With a New Homeland
Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion

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 Kang, each of which measures three inches square. Beyond, 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. The kicker on this occasion was Joseph Beuys assaulting one of the pianos with an ax. 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. Behind stands a camera recording the scene, which can include the viewer. 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.” Underneath a picture of a hand grenade he writes “Chicago/ Was/ Very Cold.” 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.

Brooklyn Heights Press & Cobble Hill News
November 27, 2003
‘Buddha’ Artist Explains His ‘Diaries’ and ‘Notes’
Rotunda Gallery, NY

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 went visually impaired because of diabetetes, 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 hand-written 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 Catalog / 2002
Bridges – Interspace – Sky
Pruess & Ochs Gallery, Berlin, Germany

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 Sophienstrasse 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 – Interspace – 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 – West, 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. Visitors 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.

Sculpture Magazine / Sep. 2002
Amazed World, United Nations, NY

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 walk-in 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 overed. 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 Catalogue / 1997
Venice Biennale, Italy

Kwang-Su Oh

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 artists, Ik-Joong Kang 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 constitute 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.

IK-JOONG KANG 2008

Ruth K. Meyer

Travelers to South Korea will find that the capital, Seoul, is brimming with artistic activities even though the “economic miracle” years have passed. The Koreans’ continued optimism for eventual unification finds its best expression in one notable project, the rebuilding of a prominent national monument, Gwanghwamun, the gatehouse to the Gyeongbokgung palace complex. The construction site is enclosed in a temporary shed that is partially concealed behind an immense mural commissioned from the Korean-American artist, Ik-Joong Kang, who has been pursuing his career in New York City since 1984. Approaching the age of fifty, Kang is receiving international attention for a range of public activities that draw upon his personal style. This article reviews the latter and describes his Amazed World projects involving the work of children.

Kang’s 2007 “Mountain and Wind” mural was awarded by the Korean government and announced Kang’s success as a public artist in his birthplace. The freestanding mural, 89 feet high by 155 feet wide is located at the terminus of a major boulevard in Seoul. The Gyeongbokgung palace, where the boulevard begins, was built in 1395 and became the foremost of five palaces built by the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). Following victories over warring Ming and Mongol factions, General Yi Seoung-gye, a founder and a first king of the Joseon Dynasty, moved the capital of Korea from Gaeseoung to Seoul in October 1394 and located the Gyeongbokgung on the 28th of the same month. The history of Seoul as the capital of Korea begins from this date.

Over the centuries, the road from the Gwanghwamun gate developed into Tae Pyong Road, a major artery of civic and national pride. Stretching for one kilometer, Tae Pyong Road is the address for governmental ministries, foreign embassies (including the USA) and Seoul’s City Hall, where it terminates. Think Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, and you’ll have the picture.

Kang’s “Mountain and Wind” mural is laden with symbols of rebirth and unification that speak to Gwanghamun’s storied history. The palace gate had to be rebuilt after Japanese invaders left it in ashes, not once, but twice, during two separate invasions in the 16th century. During Japan’s occupation (1910-1945), the gate was relocated as an affront to Korean dignity and spirit. After the 1950s Korean War, the gate was hurriedly rebuilt in its original location using concrete with a wooden façade. The new structure currently being rebuilt behind Kang’s mural will be a meticulous reconstruction to its original splendor and will take from three to five years to complete.

Traditional and contemporary Korea meet at the Gwanghwamun, which will one day stand open so that everyone can enjoy the former royal palace and its grounds. To one side of the palace complex, there is a new royal palace museum that celebrates the achievements of the Joseon dynasty. The last of these hereditary rulers permitted the establishment of a modern Korea, although it was dictated to them under duress by Japanese administration that controlled Korea until 1945. In the last quarter of the 19th century the Joseon kings were compelled by Japan and other world powers to open the country to foreign inventions and Korea began to participate in the worldwide industrial revolution.

Under the rule of the Japanese, the hereditary rule of the Joseon dynasty came to an end in 1911, so today this dynasty is revered more for its historic support of traditional arts than for its capitulation to foreign invaders and industrialization. This is the dynasty that produced the fine b’uncheong ceramics for which Korea is famous and also the cherished, uniquely Korean, ceramic form, the Moon Jar. A spherical vase formed by the union of two hemispherical bowls and finished by the addition of a small, almost concealed foot and a narrow lip at the top, the moon jar is glazed with a thin translucent white that appears casually applied with irregular strokes giving the ware a handmade appearance. The surfaces of the moon jars dimly glow just like the moon and the imperfections are admired since these recall the moon’s surface. The nine best and largest extant examples of moon jars are designated national treasures and are held in both public and private collections including the British Museum, the Osaka Museum of Oriental Ceramics, the National Palace Museum of Korea, and the Samsung Museum in Seoul. In interviews for this article Kang has said of his inspiration, “The Moon Jar is like a human being, filled with air and spirit. Both are made of earth and have a foot, a body, shoulders and a lip. Collectors treat Moon Jars as family members animating them with their projected visions of human existence.”

In his recent work, Kang has taken the moon jar as an icon and compares its formation to the future unification of North and South Korea. The moon jar features prominently in the Gwanghwamun mural along with brushstroke paintings of In Wang, the mountain that lies northeast of the palace complex and is visible from it. Mt. In Wang, also called the Benevolent King Mountain, was thought to protect the region of Seoul’s original city center. It is one of Korea’s most significant sacred mountains, an active center of shamanism and folk-religious traditions. It rises to a height of 338 meters and turns its sheer granite face to the Chongno-Gu community below it where the former royal court residences and palace support services were located.

In his design for the gatehouse mural Kang established two huge vertical planes for the grid of images. The front plane recreates the silhouetted shape of the two-tiered pagoda that is being rebuilt using a grid of moon jar paintings. Behind it the back plane establishes the physical location through a grid of rectangular landscape paintings. The offset of the two planes adds an architectonic dimension to the mural. At ground level the barrel vaulted entrances to the future gateways have been outlined and in one open vault Kang’s signature motif, the 3×3 inch square painting, has been used as architectural ornament. Impressive by daylight, Kang’s Gwanghwamun mural becomes spectrally romantic when it is illuminated at night in a palette of rainbow-hued LED lighting.

Ik-Joong Kang’s art has long been recognizable and memorable for his use of 3 x 3 inch stretched canvas paintings and carved wooden blocks, arrayed in a grid and displaying images that are combined, multiplied and deployed in various architectural arrangements. With these small squares Kang can cover a wall, create an enclosure or surround a monument depending on the site that is offered. As his work has become known and opportunities have increased, Kang has expanded the format to include larger, nearly 24 inch-square paintings, while retaining the dominant grid.

Kang has lived in New York City since 1984 when he left Korea to pursue an advanced degree in fine arts. Since that time Kang has benefited from all of the career building advantages that the city offers. After graduation from Pratt Institute in 1987, Kang began to show his work and seek out public art competitions. He won numerous awards his mentor, the modern master, Nam June Paik, (d. 2006). A perceptive Whitney curator, Eugenie Tsai, had the idea to introduce them and showed together in 1994 at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, CT. Paik found Kang to be not just a fellow Korean trying to make it in New York, but also a kindred spirit. Thereafter, Paik promoted Kang’s work internationally and helped him launch an exhibition career in Europe. Kang speaks of Paik with devotion and reverence recalling that Paik once said to him with a childlike smile: “What will happen in the 30th century?” This futuristic comment has remained in Kang’s mind and he says, “To me, he is a shaman who sees stars even in daylight.”

Kang didn’t have it easy to begin with and worked numerous jobs while studying at Pratt. There was no time for a studio, no money to fund one, so Kang drew constantly on small canvases measuring 3 x 3 inches as he shuttled around Manhattan. Desperate to learn English, he drew objects and ideas and lettered them capriciously in English, then affixed the drawings to small stretched canvases. The naïve charm of these simple paintings translated into a savvy contemporary statement when walls of them were erected. In 1996, at the Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, Kang’s installation “365 Days of English,” combined 4000 blocks featuring English words and phrases, a tape recording of his voice reciting the words. This work is now in the contemporary art collection of the Samsung Art Museum in Seoul.

Kang’s work uses one of the most significant symbolic structures of late 20th century art, the grid. The prominence of systems using the grid emerged in the 1960s under the headings of Minimal and Conceptual Art. Not only geometry, used by Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, but also language arts, used by Jasper Johns, appeared within grid systems. Whereas other artists used these systems to establish their intellectual distance from the craftwork of art making, Kang used his grids to create humor and to portray the profound nature of language acquisition. With the addition of small toys, household objects and all the trivia of American street culture, Kang embellished his blocky murals with ever richer accumulations.

Infinitely extensible the grid is familiar indoors and out of doors as a building technique. Out of doors, the grid slips easily into the realm of ornament and design and there is a rich history of gridded ornament in Korean traditional building. Walls and ceilings of Korean temples and palaces are vividly painted with repeating squared and cubic patterns that use motifs from the flora and fauna of the natural world in symbolic contexts. So whether Kang got his grid in New York City from observations of the tiles in the subway stations (as he once said to an interviewer) or brought it with him in his bags could inspire a rich discussion of comparative cultures from East and West, now and then.

The point is that Kang’s work gained early acceptance when he began to show in 1985 at Long Island University with “1000 Works,” all the blocks he had at that moment. Two years later there were “3000 Works” in his thesis show for Pratt and in 1988 “6000 Works” were available for Broadway Windows Gallery. Since that time, both the blocks and the exhibitions have been steadily multiplying. Kang’s public commissions began in 1991 when he created a mural for New York City’s MTA in the Queens Main Street Station.

By 1997 Kang had achieved recognition in his own country. That year he was chosen to install work in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for which he received a Special Merit Award. His first exhibition in his home country since his emigration, “Throw Everything Together and Add,” had taken place in the preceding year, 1996, and included 50,000 blocks. It is from this point that Kang began to move toward making statements that are about more than just the accumulation of blocks and his English lessons. He started to explore his unique position between two cultures, Korean and American, and to reference his childhood in an occupied country.

Kang grew up close to the US Army base in Seoul and remembers the soldiers who distributed chocolates to him and his playmates. Sweet treats appeared first in a gallery installation in Leeds, England; however, the double-edged metaphor of American generosity was significantly elaborated upon when Kang coated a colossal statue of General Douglas MacArthur with chocolate for his installation “8,490 Days of Memory” which enumerates the number of days Kang lived in Korea from birth to emigration. At the general’s feet are arranged 8,490 plastic cubes encasing objects from his childhood. MacArthur stands as conqueror and savior, defender and colonizer, representing the ambiguous nature of American involvement in peace for Korea that still has not been fully achieved.

Collaborative Projects: Amazed World

In 1999 Kang started his work with children’s drawings that, like his own paintings, are laminated on 3” x 3” blocks and coated with polyurethane. The first project “100,000 Dreams” was intended to display an array of 50,000 drawings by South Korean children on one wall with 50,000 drawings by North Korean children on the other side of a temporary exhibit space at Pa Ju Unification Park in the northern limits of South Korea near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). It was on the eve of the new millennium and with new hopes swirling around the world, Kang began to think of how his art could affect the longed for unification of the Koreas in the future. His marriage and subsequent delight in becoming a father had also propelled him down this new artistic path. But, the North Korean government was not receptive, so Kang placed 50,000 empty blocks in the exhibition anyway as a demonstration of his sincerity and intentions.

Shortly after this an introduction to a United Nations official brought him into the orbit of UNICEF and its international resources. Through a number of NGOs (Non-governmental Organizations) around the world, Kang began to collect drawings from children of many nations, intending to mingle them for an installation titled “Amazed World” to be shown at the UN Headquarters in New York City. The opening was scheduled for September 11, 2001, Kang’s birthday, and of course, the day of the attack on the World Trade Center. News of Kang’s exhibition was submerged in the waves of grief and mourning that engulfed the city.

“100,000 Dreams” and “Amazed World,” launched a new phase of the artist’s career that Kang describes with animated enthusiasm. Admitting that other artists tell him frankly that this work is too naïve and juvenile, too political and far from the contemporary cutting-edge where he had originally been headed, Kang has pursued unique challenges and pushed impressive boundaries. For example, Kang’s “Moon of Dreams,” a project for Lake Ilsan, Kyungki Do in Korea, (2004), used a gigantic inflated sphere pasted over with 126,000 childrens’ drawings that floated on the lake as if the moon had come down to earth. Similarly, in connections with UNICEF, Kang was able to establish an on-going project for hospitalized children to exchange their drawings for mural installations in hospitals. The first of these features 25,000 drawings from 25 countries and is in a public education area of Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital (2006).

While the Cincinnati project was getting underway in 2005, Kang was working on a commission for the new Princeton, New Jersey, Public Library building. Artwork for the building had not been budgeted and a concerned board member noticing this omission helped to raise the funding for a first floor hallway mural. Kang proposed to open the project to the community and on one Saturday, Princeton citizens old and young came to the library to contribute writings and drawings, poetry and word-plays, trinkets, trivia, toys, photos, old buttons and assorted sports equipment. Each item was catalogued, considered and 1,000 of them were inserted and incorporated into a wall of 3” x 3” paintings and carved blocks by the artist.

The library site was a non-descript space located in a passage linking two public entries, with a café and the restrooms between them, but the mural he titled “Happy World” (2006) has since become a singular destination and the pride of the local Princetonians who helped create it. Consistent with the age of information management, according to library director, Leslie Berger, Kang’s mural will soon have its own website so that its content can be visited online and the ideas it encapsulates will go far beyond the borders of Princeton.

The Amazed World projects have proliferated as word of them has spread. In Louisville, Kentucky, at the Mohammad Ali Center Kang’s temporary installation “Hope and Dream” went up at the time of his 2005 show at the Speed Museum of Art and has been since been retained as a permanent feature.

“Small Pieces for Peace” (2007) was a collaborative effort by the Eurasian Foundation, UNICEF Germany and Alexander Ochs Gallery, Berlin. It was part of a larger exhibition entitled “Balance!!” that coincided with that year’s G8 Summit meeting held in a small German seaside town. Kang led a large team of workers who prepared the panels of children’s drawings and installed them in a roofless abandoned building in Heiligendamm, Bad Doberan, Germany, not far from where the world leaders were meeting. This project was unique in the series because it intentionally involved cadres from many different social groups in the preparation of the drawings. To Kang it seemed like the whole town pitched in: there were teachers and jobless, single mothers and pastors, musicians and carpenters, along with people living in the shelters. When he recalls this diversity, Kang says he sensed the importance of what he perceived to be the healing benefit of handling the children’s drawings for some of those who joined in the activity.

Increasingly, the Korean art community has been eager to recognize Kang and offer him exhibitions. One especially coveted project will be an installation of Kang’s work at the Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art where he will share a large cylindrical gallery with a famous Nam June Paik sculpture, “The More, the Better,” (1988.) Paik erected a tower of television sets programmed with contemporary videos reaching a height of 18.5 meters. Kang’s work, “Multiple Dialogue Infinity,” will be an homage to Paik spiraling up and encircling it. 65,000 of Kang’s small paintings will be in dialogue with Paik’s 1,003 TV screens graduated in size as they rise to the rafters.

In June 2009, Kang will display his works in all fifteen galleries of the Seoul Calligraphy Art Museum, located at the Seoul Arts Center. The significance of this venue is that the paintings and calligraphy of his 18th century ancestor Pyoahm Kang Se-Hwang are in the museum’s permanent collection and frequently have been displayed in exhibitions. Kang Se-Hwang painted in the highly revered Chinese literati style combining poetic commentary with landscape elements, brushstrokes and areas of colored wash. Ever since Ik-Joong Kang’s talent manifested itself in childhood, his family has encouraged him to follow his ancestor’s footsteps. Their Confucian faith in the power of ancestry is now being richly rewarded.

Tiny Windows, An Amazed World / 2008
GMOMA, Ansan, Korea

Joon Lee

There is one artist who has collaborated with children, traveling around the globe with the naïve belief that “A dream each person dreams is just a dream, but a dream we share can become a reality.” Born and brought up in Korea, the artist moved to New York in his youth. He depicted his daily surroundings and life during each moment, using small-size canvases that the artist himself developed. This type of canvas is convenient to carry and can even be put into a pocket. On 3×3 inch palm-sized canvases, the artist began representing cultural shocks he experienced while in New York and all the conflicts, self-reflections, curiosities, and everyday scenes that he went through while walking through the subway all with a sense of wit and irony. Year after year, these small paintings increased from one thousand to 10 or 100 thousand. He gradually became the focus of attention in the New York art scene with his installation art consisting of numerous canvases like a mosaic.

Since 1985, when Kang Ik-joong held his first one-man exhibition at the Long Island University Museum with 1,000 pieces of art, the number of pieces composing his installation work has gradually increased. Kang gained reputation through a series of exhibitions at the Asian American Art Center and Queen’s Art Museum and especially through the two-person exhibition, Multiple Dialogue, at the Whiney Museum in Connecticut with world-renowned video artist Paik Nam June. There, he presented a work composed of over 25,000 pieces. Kang represented all things under the sun, including everyday scenes occurring near his studio located in Chinatown, Manhattan, his own humble dreams and hopes, and the social and cultural icons of our times. His work features all kinds of things like interesting phrases found in the news and in commercials, funny images and objects, a Buddha learning English, and sound paintings with small speakers.

Kang is a rare contemporary artist who has tried to capture all objects and worlds in a moment. Perhaps no other artists are more diverse and prolific than him. He keeps on earnestly drawing when delightful or sad and even while lying down, traveling, or moving. The small, 3-inch square canvas becomes one with him and is a sure-fire trademark representing his art.

Kang began pouring a considerable amount of his energy into public art and joint work with children. The form of his installation work that brings together several hundreds or several thousands pieces in the same place is quite fitting for not only gallery and museum spaces, but also for public and cooperative art. In his installations, each piece has its own completeness, but together, they present a magnificent panorama and make a complete composition as a whole. Kang’s work has been presented in the form of public art many times including a wall installation at the Flushing subway station in Queens, New York in 1991, a wall painting at a vocational school in Queens in 1992, and a mural at the San Francisco International Airport in 1994. In these murals and installations, he combined childlike, ordinary, and familiar images in a formal frame placed in harmony with any wall surface or any space, departing from art’s usual fixed frame. These works also naturally showed the amount of importance the artist places on communication.

Commissioned to make a mural in the lobby of a public library in Princeton, New Jersey in 2004, Kang gained momentum for actively involving local residents in the project, irrespective of his own or children’s participation. Noted as a college town, according to him, Princeton has a strong impression as a city of severance since the residential areas of white people and Hispanics or other non-white people are thoroughly divided by an avenue. For A Happy World he conceived to unify those residents by breaking down a wall among them, he asked them to donate their treasured belongings, underscoring meaning of sharing something.

He permanently set a work singing harmony and hope in the public library by exploiting a wide variety of donations such as his own pieces, Einstein’s pipe, memos and signatures by Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners, family photographs, and playthings. In the same year, as part of the World Culture Open (WCO), Kang completed A Moonlit Dream project, a 12-meter large-scale balloon made up of 126 thousand paintings sent by children from 141 countries via the Internet, at Lake Park in Ilsan.

He is a collector bringing together children’s dreams and images, artist, and curator as well as a messenger of hope and dreams. Last year, he did an installation for the Group of Eight (G8) summit meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany and currently put ahead several public art joint projects. These projects demanding a huge amount of expenses and institutional supports cannot be achieved without extraordinary verve. The reason why Kang has continued such projects despite difficult situations is because he is confident that if small dreams and humble wishes gather, it exerts a great cultural strength.

For this Gyeoggi Museum project, the artist specially encouraged children of migrant workers living in Ansan where the museum is located. In Ansan as an industrial city, migrant laborers from 50 countries reside in this region. It is more meaningful that migrant workers, physically handicapped persons, and juvenile offenders as volunteers partook in the project along with children.

Under the theme of My Dream, 50,000 children from Marado Islet, the country’s southernmost area to the civilian access area in the DMZ, the country’s northernmost region, participated jointly in this installation. The children’s palm-sized pictures bear their humble dreams about pets they want to raise, playthings they wish to have and their dreams to become a nurse or a teacher. Through those paintings depicting themselves as a doctor, an astronaut, or a football player, children living in different regions, cultures, and environments represent their different dreams and narratives.

For the artist, it is of no significance whether those paintings were well rendered or poor. What’s significant is not a visual outgrowth but a creation of new values by collaborating with the same dream. That refers to the world of childlike innocence and purity as an remarkable vessel containing the nation’s dream. Nevertheless, the world of various dreams and hope rendered by children with crayons and pencils look visually so beautiful. Like a mosaic flamboyantly embroidered on the entire wall of a cathedral, they are in harmony.

During this process, Kang conceived of projects that would actively encourage local residents and children to participate. As part of such projects, 100,000 People’s Dreams, held in Paju in 1999, is a good example of one of these projects conducted jointly with children. Kang has represented his social and cultural concerns as well as his own daily life and his simple dreams and hopes through his paintings. As an artist of the only divided nation in the globe, he has dreamed up of a festive exhibition to express hope for the unification of the two Koreas at the Tongil-dongsan Park adjacent to Imjingak, a park located on the banks of the Imjin River. For this project, he planned to collect 50,000 paintings of South Korean children and 50,000 pictures from North Korean children.

Kang did his best and worked tirelessly, paying several visits to North Korea, but regrettably, in the final stage, North Korea decided not to participate. The exhibition remained an unfinished project executed with only the 50,000 paintings by the South Korean kids. The space to be filled with the 50,000 pictures by the North Korean children was left empty and aptly named the ‘wall of waiting’. Recently in Korea, public art projects aimed at revitalizing local cultures and inducing the cultural participation of local residents have become pervasive. His way of working has finally been introduced to Korea and has become dedicated to the development of our public art.

In line with the Paju exhibition, Kang presented Amazed World composed of the drawings of 34,000 children from 135 nations around the world at the lobby of the UN headquarters building in celebration of the UN Special Congress on Children in 2001. Starting a year earlier, he began collecting countless children’s paintings that bore their dreams and hopes for this work, asking NGOs, schools, medical centers, and governmental organizations to gather pictures. It was quite remarkable that such a huge number of children from various hot spots and poverty-stricken areas, including Iraqi, Uzbek, and Congolese children and Croatian war orphans, were all able to take part in the project.

Thanks to the connection with the UN, he was commissioned to do a drawing installation for the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky that opened in 2005. For this memorial hall, which was established to pay homage to the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali for his efforts on behalf of black human rights, poverty, and world peace, Kang responded to the request from the Center by creating an installation with 5,000 drawings done by children from 141 countries, under the title of Hope & Dream. This work included drawings from Afghan refugee children in Pakistan and African children infected with AIDS. Kang said about this work, “I want to show how children’s dreams are pure and innocent, irrespective of their nationality, race, or religion.”

Kang Ik-joong presents a harmonious, astounding world by collecting children’s innocent dreams and hopes as seen through tiny windows. Global space and time are becoming narrower and narrower by the day. The 21st century is an age where networks and interactions are considered paramount, which has broken down barriers among regions, races, and classes. However, in the global village, poverty, racial discrimination, and other disputes and conflicts have still persisted. The artist seems to have the humble belief that if gathered together, ordinary wishes may exert great strength and power. As seen in the recent candlelight vigils, if brought together, small, seemingly insignificant wishes can change the world.

Although each candle might seem minor and inconsequential, if combined with others, they become the light of hope with the power to change the world. It is hard to calculate the worth of the cultural strength and healing power derived from participation in this world of dreams and hopes that demolishes the barriers between races, cultures, and districts. Kang’s installation, joined by people from diverse walks of life including not only kids, but also college students, handicapped people, juvenile delinquents, and soldiers, turns into to a reservoir of hopes and dreams and a place where our lives become art.

Korean artist Ik-Joong Kang on the art of being Zen – interview
Posted on 02/05/2014 by Art Radar

Christine Lee

Korea’s Ik-Joong Kang speaks to Art Radar about his artistic influences, his hope for reunification of the two Koreas and why people are the most exciting artistic medium of all.

Ik-Joong Kang, who early on in his career was awarded the Venice Biennale Special Merit prize in 1997, is among Korea’s foremost contemporary artists. He is known for his moon jars and 3 by 3 inch canvases, which over the past three decades have multiplied to create larger narratives through monumental installations.

Ik Joong Kang in his studio, 2014. Photo by Christine Lee.

Ik-Joong Kang was born in Cheongju, Korea, in 1960 and received his BFA from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea, in 1984. He moved to New York in 1984 to study at Pratt Institute where he received his MFA in 1988. He has exhibited widely, including a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York (1996); a two-person show with Nam June Paik at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, Connecticut (1994); and group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1996); 47th Venice Biennale (1997), Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2000), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2010) and the Korean Pavilion for the Shanghai Expo (2010).

Art Radar talked to Kang about his artistic inspirations, and the importance of community and humanity in his works.

Ik-Joong Kang’s studio 2014. Photo by Christine Lee.

You were born in South Korea and moved to New York in 1984 to attend the MFA programme at Pratt Institute. Could you describe your background and why you became an artist?

I was born in Cheongju, about 100 km south of Seoul, and grew up in the Itaewon district of Seoul during the sixties and seventies. At that time, Itaewon was like an island within the city where many foreigners lived, especially US military personnel and their families. Many Koreans who lived there had jobs related to the US military base nearby. My family chose the area because it had affordable housing. Upon my arrival in New York, I experienced less cultural shock than most of my Korean friends, because I already felt comfortable in the American culture.

My interest in becoming an artist could maybe be traced back to a day when I was six or seven. I drew a sketch of my grandmother’s passport portrait and showed it to my uncle. I remember he literally jumped up and down exclaiming that I must be the reincarnation of one of our great grandfathers. Our family was poor but we were proud to be descendants of many famous artists and scholars. My uncle’s jump changed my life.

Ever since that day, I became quite a diligent artist all throughout high school. But after enrolling in one of the most prestigious art schools in Korea, Hong-Ik University in Seoul, somehow my interest in becoming an artist suddenly faded away. I sensed that something was missing and I soon realised art school was not the best choice for me. I was yearning for something to fill a personal void, somewhere to find the answer and perhaps, most importantly, somewhere to escape. In 1984, I arrived in New York with not much money and the knowledge to survive. But as I think upon it now, New York was the right place for me. With its artistic pulse, New York City was the place where my uncle’s Confucian belief in the power and continuity of my ancestry would best be realised after all.

Ik-Joong Kang, ’100,000 Dreams’, 1999-2000, 60,000 children’s drawings, Paju, Korea. Image courtesy the artist.

Storing dreams in moon jars

What are your major artistic influences and how do they relate to your work? Has it changed over time? What inspires you as an artist today?

The moon jar is probably my main influence. I believe the moon jar is like a human being, filled with air and spirit. The traditional moon jar, made during the Joseon dynasty (1392-1911), is a simple and plain jar, deep white [in colour] with the shape of a moon. The surface of the moon jar dimly glows just like the moon and its imperfections are admirable. Because a potter used particularly extra soft clay, he had to first make the bottom half — separate from the top half — then connecting the two semi-spheres: two parts into the kiln to become one.

10,000 Dreams (1999-2000), my first outdoor installation reflective of the idea of connecting the two Koreas, was based upon the process of making the moon jar. It becomes a moon through this transformation. A notable fable goes that the Chinese poet Li Bai (701-762) drowned when, sitting drunk in a boat, he tried to seize the moon’s reflection in the water. The moon was the place of immortality and a connecting station to the other world, a place where people store their dreams.

The sky is blue before the full moon night and it wears the bright new dress on the morning of New Year’s Day. Right before the storm the sky is mild green. And it seems layered before winter blizzard comes. – Li Bai

I also found a similar inspiration in the way one makes Bibimbap (a traditional Korean dish). Bibimbap is usually made from mixed rice with bits of meat, fish, vegetables and seasoning. Although simple, the numbers of variations to this dish are infinite and vary with individual circumstances and preference, the underlying constant always being the rice. So long as there is a bowl of rice with a scoop of Gochoojang (Korean chili-paste), one can make Bibimbap, simply by throwing everything together and adding the remaining touches. Just like making a moon jar, it holds flexibility and embraces everything within a given structure.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Everything Together and Add’, 1994, Capp Street Project in San Francisco. Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art. Image courtesy the artist.

The title of the installation Throw Everything Together and Add at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco in 1994 came from the idea of making Bibimbap.

I believe the moon jar contains unlimited potential for connection to the outside world through the spirit of sharing and openness. My moon jar cannot be the moon jar from the Chosun dynasty. It might share the spirit of Chilsung Mudang [the shaman/priestess – Mudang – who worships the spirits of the seven stars – Chilsung] in Cheju Island in Korea, who worshiped the seven-star gods and simply performed her ritual dance before only the Seven Star Cider. She was able to do her performance without formal preparation. She knows how to connect with outside forces and doesn’t need a formal process or protocol. Similar to the master who created the moon jar, Chilsung Mudang’s performance was not focused on the appearance and rule so much, but more on her state of mind.

Breaking down walls through collaboration

Could you talk about some of the works or exhibitions that are or were most meaningful to you?

Happy World (2005) was a public project at the Princeton Public Library, New Jersey. It was more like a collaboration between the artist and community. The mural featured thousands of objects, most of which were donated by local residents who brought historical mementos, poetry, trinkets, trivia, toys, sculptures and even their babies’ first foot prints. Each item was catalogued, considered, and 1,000 of them were inserted and incorporated into a wall of three-by-three inch paintings and carved blocks by me. Happy World has since become a singular destination and, I think, the pride of the many local Princetonians who helped to create it. Working for the community along with their participation and contribution was the main idea of Happy World, and I learned that by making a wall of art we could break down the walls separating each other.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Buddha Learning English’, 2000, 3000 English idioms on canvas, 7.6 x 7.6 cm each and chocolate covered Buddha, 108 x 40 x 40 cm. Collection of Museum Ludwig. Image courtesy the artist.

Buddha Learning English (1999) at the Museum Ludwig was influenced by Seokguram Grotto in Gyeongju, Korea. The basic layout of the grotto includes an arched entrance, antechamber and a main rotunda. In the middle of the rotunda, the Buddha is seated with a serene expression of meditation and is accompanied by ten statues in various niches along the walls. In Buddha Learning English, there is a curved wall covered from top to bottom with 3,060 jewel-toned paintings, all measuring three-by-three inches, and enclosed therein is a chocolate covered Seated Maitreya, a Korean National Treasure from the sixth century of a seated Buddha. Each canvas bears a different phrase – for example, “developed moment”, “happy wife”, “erotic context” – randomly selected from my daily reading of The New York Times and other newspapers and magazines. The statue rotates slowly on its base, accompanied by the repetitious sound of chanting.

The series of Buddha paintings and installations was developed early in the nineties. In this series, there were thousands of Buddha paintings that had speakers mounted on the back of the canvas. They played sounds of Buddhist monks chanting and my own voice reading English vocabulary. I got the idea of sound coming out of a picture from a Christmas card that I had received, which played Jingle Bells when you open it. Buddha is not just a figure who lived thousands of years ago, but was everywhere and in everyone including myself.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘One Month Living Performance’ while Kang was at Pratt Institute. Two Raw Gallery, New York, 1986. Image courtesy the artist.

In your artist statement, you’ve written about how working in a three-inch-square format became a part of your daily artistic practice, and how “the idea of making many squares of specific sizes to fit into one screen came about from Zen art. Each screen containing many squares provokes one to be contained in one small square and at the same time within a bigger space … through the small ‘perfect’ space, one can experience a whole new world that is different from the broad world which actually exists.” Could you elaborate on this and how it relates to your work today?

I developed the three-inch-by-three-inch format during my days as a graduate student at the Pratt Institute in New York. I worked on this series primarily outside the classroom. I was poor at the time, working between two jobs at a flea market in Queens and a deli in Manhattan. I needed to find a way to fit art into my lifestyle and the solution was the three-by-three canvas.

I discovered that a small canvas could easily fit into my pockets and into the palm of my hand. And best of all, it was affordable. My lengthy commute transformed into a mobile studio, allowing me time to work. When I first started, my goal was to transform the doodles into large canvases if and when I had some money, [but] as one small canvas accumulated into hundreds and soon thousands, I realised that it was not necessary to transfer them onto big canvases. What I was making was fun and simple. True Zen.

“Multiple Dialogue Infinity”, Ik-Joong Kang with Nam June Paik at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea, 2009-2010. 62,000 works, 180 metres. Photo by In Sub Shin. Image courtesy the artist.

62,000 three-inch-square canvases were shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea in 2009, under the title “Multiple Dialogue Infinity”. My installation, Smaramansang, surrounded a gigantic tower consisting of 1,003 television monitors, [which constituted] The More, the Better, created by Nam June Paik. Samramansang, which means ‘all things in nature’ in Korean, is everything around me and within me. It includes the things I never imagined.

Early on in your artistic career, you participated in an exhibition, Multiple/Dialogue (1994) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Connecticut with Nam June Paik. Could you talk about this exhibition and how this collaboration came about?

The idea came from the museum’s curator, Eugenie Tsai. She called me when I was in San Francisco working on an installation at the Capp Street Project. She asked me whether I was interested in having a show with Nam June Paik at the Whitney. Without hesitation I said “yes”. While we were preparing the show, Nam June faxed a simple, two-sentence-long message from Düsseldorf in Germany, which read: “I am very flexible. It is very important that Ik-Joong has the better space.”

After the opening reception, one of Nam June’s patrons who worked in finance invited us to his house in Connecticut. He was astonished and amused at the same time by Nam June’s insightful interpretation of minute-by-minute changes in Wall Street. Nam June knew who was fired and who was hired. Then Nam June asked us, “What’s going to happen in the thirtieth century?” He smiled a childish smile. No one could answer the question, because no one even mentioned the 21st century yet. I thought on the way home, “I am pretty sure he is a shaman who sees stars even in daylight.”

Connecting two Koreas through public installations

The installations Wall of Hope (2010) for Seoul Asan Children’s Hospital, Moon of Dream (2004), Amazed World (2001-2002) and 100,000 Dreams (1999) are made of drawings from children around the world. What was the inspiration behind these projects?

When I was young, I often heard stories from my elders about their lives in a unified Korea, before the war split them apart. I remember how their eyes filled with hope of reuniting once again with their long lost family and friends.

I started collecting drawings by children from 1997, a year before my son was born. With 100,000 Dreams (1999-2000), I was trying to connect the divided country by children’s dreams. 60,000 drawings from South Korea were displayed inside a one-kilometre-long greenhouse near the DMZ border between North and South Korea. The plan was to collect the children’s drawings from both Koreas – but in the end only the works of South Korean children were installed. This project grew into Moon of Dream (2004), Amazed World, Happy World (2005) and other projects. 100,000 Dreams inspired me to build an actual bridge, The Bridge of Dream, over the Imjin River, connecting North and South Korea.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Amazed World’, 2001-2002, 34,000 children’s drawings from over 120 countries, 7.6 x 7.6 cm each. United Nations, New York. Image courtesy the artist.

In the visitors’ lobby of the United Nations in New York, nearly 34,000 children’s drawings from over 125 countries are incorporated into Amazed World (2001-2002). The opening of the exhibition was scheduled on 11 September 2001, the day of the bombing of the World Trade Center. Public viewing was postponed in the waves of grief and mourning that engulfed the city.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Moon of Dream’ in progress, 2004, 126,000 children’s drawings from 149 countries, Hosu Park, Korea. Photo by Jeong Yul Lee. Image courtesy the artist.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Moon of Dream’, 2004, 126,000 children’s drawings from 149 countries on vinyl and canvas, globe: 15 metres in diameter, Hosu Park, Korea. Photo by Jeong Yul Lee. Image courtesy the artist.

Moon of Dream, a 48-foot diameter globe with 126,000 children’s drawings, was launched at the lake, not far from the DMZ. In the morning of the opening day, I was shocked to see a somewhat deflated and unbalanced giant globe floating on the water. Apparently, we pumped too much air into the balloon thinking that we could get the perfectly round shape of the globe. But in doing so, the vinyl canvas material of the globe ripped and the full moon shape slowly became an imperfect one.

There was despair at first, but soon I saw a lovely shape in the deflated globe – a moon jar! What made the moon jar so beautiful were the imperfections. It’s imperfection [that] makes perfection.

Ik-Joong Kang, ’8490 Days of Memory’, installation, 1997, Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York. Image courtesy the artist.

There is a quantifying and numerical aspect to your works and titles, such as 100,000 Dreams, your three-inch-squared format, 40,000 art panels on the Korean Pavilion, the Moon of Dreams installation made of 126,000 children’s drawings from 141 countries and so on. Could you talk about the importance of numbers in your work?

I’m good at counting and memorising useless numbers. It’s one of those habits I really need to get rid of. I heard that it’s a common practice among prudent people. I find satisfaction in figuring out the number of stories as I pass by a building. How many trees there are from my home to the office. How many lights there are in the Lincoln Tunnel that I drive through about twice a week. Once I’m out of that tunnel, I feel nauseous from all that counting; it’s something that I just do.

But numbers are very helpful in understanding a certain situation or relationship. Like the way numbers can explain the altitude of sound, I believe that there is a definite correlation between the distance of two objects. In this sense, the correlation between my studio to my favourite Chinese restaurant, A-Wah on Catherine Street, can be explained by the number of steps: 722 steps – but only achievable if you can avoid the tourists on Canal Street stopping to ask for directions.

Can you describe your artistic vision for the South Korean Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010? Could you talk a bit about the process involved in building a monumental installation of this scale? How did the theme for the installation Things I Know come about?

In over a decade, I have written thousands of short sentences in Hangul (Korean alphabet), based on my beliefs and observations of things around me – things that are true or could be true, but there is no scientific proof that they are true. It is a process that I go through to document moments of my life. Things I know is like a personal diary. It is a never-ending process that comes from everyday moments in my life.

Ik-Joong Kang, “Things I Know”, 2010, Shanghai Expo Korean Pavillion, China. Image courtesy the artist.

I chose Hangul for the Shanghai Expo 2010 and other projects associated with Things I know. The entire Korean Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo was covered by 40,000 aluminium panels of Hangul. The alphabet has 24 consonant and vowel letters [and] I always thought the moon jar and Hangul share the same secret code of two becoming one. Like the top and bottom part of a moon jar, which become one after waiting in the fire, the vowel and consonant of Hangul make a sound after they are combined in a syllabic block.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Mountain and Wind’, 2008-2010, 2611 works on wood, 58 x 58 cm each. Gwanghwa Mun, Seoul, Korea. Photo by Jeong Yul Lee. Image courtesy the artist.

How did you select the works for your retrospective “Ik-Joong Kang vs Ik-Joong Kang” (2011) at Posco Museum of Art in Seoul? What is the meaning behind the title? Can you talk about some of the works that were exhibited?

I believe life is like a train ride in which people are constantly getting on and off. One may stay on for a very short time, but another may stay on for the entire ride. In most of my installations, I share stories of things I know, people I met during my journey on the train of life. A small man sitting on top of the structure with binoculars appears at many recent installations. The small man represents me. I carefully observe the dialogue between people and I collect words and sounds like I catch butterflies in the field. Among the passengers, I find myself sitting, eating, sleeping and talking, but only if I can maintain the distance from another Ik-Joong Kang who sits on top of the train with binoculars.

One of the pieces installed at “Ik-Joong Kang vs Ik-Joong Kang” was a nine-foot statue of Korean War hero General Douglas MacArthur entirely coated in chocolate. It came from the exhibition of “8490 Days of Memory” at the Whitney Museum of Arts at Philip Morris in 1997. The sweet scent and taste of creamy chocolate played a role in the recollection of memory. I attended an elementary school near a US army base in the Itaewon district of the city [Seoul]. My friends and I would often ask the GIs passing by in their Jeeps, “Give me gum or give me chocolate.”

Chocolate was an extraordinary treat to us. When I was successful in retrieving a candy bar, I slowly removed the foil wrapper before inhaling the scent of chocolate – “smelling America” – to extend the happy moment. MacArthur, who commanded UN military forces during the Korean War, was responsible for driving North Korean forces back over the 38th parallel. General MacArthur is remembered to be bitter as war and sweet as chocolate by many Koreans, including me.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘The Bridge of Dream’, (‘Things I Know’), Suncheon Bay Garden EXPO 2013. Image courtesy the artist.

Could you talk about The Bridge of Dream, your recent work for Suncheon Bay Garden EXPO 2013? What was the inspiration behind this work? Many of your recent installations involve participation from children around the world and large group of volunteers. You have previously talked about recruiting volunteers from a prison for a project. Could you talk about the community aspect of your work?

The Bridge of Dream was constructed above the water in the form of a 175-metre-long bridge which connects the east and the west of Suncheon city. It was made to model a future project, The Bridge of Dream, which would connect the two Koreas over the Imjin River. Like the way John A. Roebling built a smaller suspension bridge over the Ohio River before he made his masterpiece, the Brooklyn Bridge.

On the exterior of the bridge I displayed Things I know. It goes like this [from a poem by the artist]:

People whose noses are alike get along well, Do not frown, but just smile at the dazzling sun light. Even a rabbit in good mood makes a sound. Dogs take after their owners. We have a stage phobia when we try to show more than what we are.

The interior of the bridge holds approximately 145,000 children’s drawings (each three by three inches) entitled My Dream by children from sixteen different countries. The children’s dreams fill the inside of the bridge and anyone who walks on this bridge will be sent to the future without even having to buy a ticket. The exhibition was closed after a six-month run, drawing over four million visitors. Now the bridge is open permanently.

Your works have involved painting, installation, sculpture and sound. Is there a medium that you would like to explore further?

People. I’d like to explore more about collaboration with people. People will be my main medium and my main inspiration for exploration.

Since 1999 we have created over thirty different installations of children’s drawing in hospitals, libraries, museums, schools and outdoor in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Germany, Korea and other countries. Over 10,000 volunteers and nearly 1,000,000 children around the world made these projects possible. Children from over 150 countries and volunteers had helped all the projects possible including prisoners, nursing home residents, soldiers and homeless people. People are the main source of our timeless dialogues.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Eighty-Four Wishes’, 2008 and 2013, Seoul Museum of Art. Collection of Seoul Museum of Art. Photo by Jeong-Yul Lee. Image courtesy the artist.

Upcoming projects

Are there any new projects you are working on?

I just finished the installation called Eighty-Four Wishes in the lobby of Seoul Museum of Art, featuring 84 moon jar paintings.

Currently, I’m working on an architectural project, Things We Know, in Cheongju, my hometown, covering the entire former cigarette factory with the Hangul [script]. This is a community project where I will ask 20,000 Cheongju citizens things they believe in and then transfer their beliefs onto coloured glass tiles.

Next fall, the entrance of the newly renovated Queens Museum of Art will be covered with the artwork Things I know and 3,000 drawings from children in New York will be installed inside the Museum library.

As a future project, DongG Ra Mee (a Circle), which is the plan for the bridge over the Imjin River, is going to be presented for the first time at the 2014 Venice Biennale [International Architecture Exhibition] this spring. This time I’m representing South Korea as an architect, not as a painter.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Things I know’, 2014, former cigarette company, Chungjoo, Korea. Image courtesy the artist.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Buncheong Airplanes’, 2013, 47 x 47 in. Image courtesy the artist.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Mountain and Wind’, 2010, 8000 works on wood, 380 x 1140 cm. Image courtesy the artist.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Blue Moon Jar’, 2012, 72 x 72 in. Image courtesy the artist.

Ik-Joong Kang, ‘Dong-G-Ra-Mee (a Circle)’, 2013-2014, proposal, 180 metre diameter, Imjin River, Korea. Image courtesy the artist.

A whole world / 2008

Nwiyeon Kim

Kang Ikjoong lives in a world that’s more extensive than any other. Three inch square canvas, the size of my palm, in the midst of infinite proliferation as we speak, is its proof.

It’s been nine months since Gwanghwamoon has been enclosed by the formation of what resembles a large water pot made with moon. ‘Moon over Gwanghwamoon’. which is what Kang Ikjoong calls his artistic installation piece that covers the reconstruction site of Gwanghwamoon, essentially symbolizes where he stands in Korea artistic scene. Kang Ikjoong is not considered to be one of those artists who stand at the forefront of the Modern Art genre working away with his acute feelers in full fear. However, with a bit of exaggeration, Kang Ikjoong is widely recognized and an artist who is widely embraced is by no means common.

Born in Chungjoo, North Choong-chung province in 1960, Kang Ikjoong spent 24 years in Korea and is going on his 24th year in New York. He prefers to work on very small canvas. 3 inches(7.62cm) in both width and length, this square canvas withstood extensive proliferation in the last 24 years. Upon his arrival to the U.S. in 1984, he had to work about 12 hours a day doing this and that to make his living. This limited him to carry canvas on his palm. What once filled the walls if San Francisco Airport, UN Headquarters, and library at Princeton University, now cover the walls at Kyungi-do Museum. They are namely ‘Window of the 50 thousand, Wall of the Future’, which portrays the hopes and dreams of 50 thousand children, and ‘Amazed World(www.amazedworld.com)’ which is a giant mural piece that covers the passage way connecting the first and second floor of the museum. Last summer, upon meeting Kang Ikjoong at his inborn passion that seems inextinguishable makes him a boy with eternal purity. I corresponded with answers that were almost poetic. They were long-forgotten rhythm and melody.

Come to think of it, the year 2008 marks the cardinal point in which the artist Kang Ikjoong spent 24 years in Korea and 24 years in New York.

It feels as if I’d left home for a quick visit somewhere but 24 years have passed. They say the weight of the years has the same impact on an eighty year old and seven year old alike. Most likely because the number of images to be saved in the memory file is predetermined. It may be true for everyone, but I have a lot more slides in memory that hold images of my childhood. The street alleys of Itaewon where I played during my elementary school years are still very vivid in my mind.

Now, I’m staying over at a friend, New York’s place. I draw pictures here and got married and got married and had a baby here as well.

If my memory dosen’t fail me, you enjoy ‘number computations’.

I’m good at counting and memorizing useless numbers. It’s one of those habits I really need to get rid of. I heard that it’s a common practice among prudent people. I actually find satisfaction in figuring out the number of stories as I pass by a building. How many trees there are from my home to office… how many lights there are in the Lincoln Tunnel which I drive through about twice a week… Once I’m out of that tunnel, I feel nauseous from all that counting, nevertheless it’s something that I just do.

But numbers are very helpful in understanding a certain situation or relationship. Like the way numbers can explain the altitudes of sound, I believe that there is a definite correlation between the distance of two objects. In this sense, the correlation between my home to my office can be explained by the number of steps. 3,628 steps, only achievable if you avoid the tourists stopping you to ask directions. Drawing a picture is like swimming across a river. When you make the initial dive into the river, all you’re faced with is the water and the sky above. You lift your head to listen to guidance of your teacher so as to not get lost in direction. The distance of the river is understood as the number of pieces I’ve done. This is what I identify as ‘How to draw (How to swim)’.

“Draw with eyes half-closed / If possible, use your left hand / Draw even if you’re bad at it / Draw even when you’re sleepy / Draw what you know / Draw something easy / Draw what’s next to you / Draw as you listen, see, and learn / Draw lying down / Draw standing up / Draw running / Draw with eyes half-open / Grin~ / Draw yourself laughing.”

I’m curious about the recent ‘Code’. The one following ‘Happiness Appreciation’ and ‘Honest Heart Numerous Efforts’…

Code is “As is.” I just made up its pen name. As is Kang Ikjoong.

I heard that you donated the mural piece, ’50 Thousand windows, Wall of the Future’, that was shown at Kyungi-do Gallery for the first time in September.

This project started in An-san, Kyungi-do. As you know, there’s quite a large population of foreign workers there. We call their children ‘Kosian’ or ‘Multi_cultural Children’. But the most accurate name would be just ‘Our Children’. I went as far south as Mara-do and as far up north as Deasung-dong Elementary School as I traveled cross-country. All pictures collected during the trip individually glued onto 3 inch wooden pieces and for preservation purposes they’re coated with liquid plastic. This complicated process was assisted by kids in Teenage Custodial House, college students, first-line troops, elders, and local volunteering housewives of An-san.

When you involve yourself in a piece that portrays children’s dreams, there is this special encounter you always experience,

It’s an encounter with ‘myself in the past and the future’, the person you had long forgotten.

Is there a decisive catalyst that drove you to regard ‘Children’ and ‘Future’ in the same light?

Long time ago, on a trip to Senegal in Africa, I was waiting at the Embassy to receive a visa to visit its neighboring country of Gambia. Prior to being separated by France and England as the colonies, Senegal and Gambia used to make-up the Kingdom of Senegal, using the same language known as Walupra. It’s been ages since those days, and now they’re not only oblivious to the meaning of unification but they don’t care. If you think about it, we live on oblivious to the fact that our own country had been divided by the will of superpower nations, too. There is really no difference between the two situations.

I started with the hope of visiting where we want to go, as if in a time machine, vicariously through dreams of children. My heartfelt wish is to be about to create a floating gallery, ‘Dream Bridge’ across Imjin River, to exhibit children’s art before reunification of Koreas is realized. It is because the mother of a father, and the father of that mother, and the daughter of a son, and the son of a daughter all dwell in me.

In reality, however, there are a number of adults who don’t take too much liking toward children.

There os a lint in the late Kim Kwangsuk’s ‘Sad Song’ that says, ‘When you see the child in an adult’. When you closely observe problematic children, you’ll find that in mist cases they’re due to a defence mechanism. I think that ‘constant praise and encouragement’ inner being. This applies squally to adults as well.

Have you ever encountered any young people who consider your projects to be mundane because it’s overly politically correct?

Politics and arts, science and economic exist within the same cycle. If I were to make their comparison to fishing, artists play the role of throwing in the fishing rod, and the scientists take the role of reeling in the catch. Economists cut up the fish on the chopping board, and lastly, politicians are responsible for allocating the fish. If the fishing rod hadn’t been thrown into the water, the cycle is immobilized with no fish to cut or allocate. This cycle has to be converted from border to connector and I think this job is left up to the artists.

I would assume that you’d consider Paik Namjune, with whom you shared an exhibition at Whitney Gallery in 1994, your soulmate.

I got to experience his 1981 piece soon after he passed away. I think it was drawn during the tine then he was getting ready for his first independent exhibition at Whitney Gallery in New York. There were scribbles in many colors written onto a TV monitor. It read, “Fifteen years were spent in reading the chronicle/ but still far left to go/ don’t know if I’ll finish before my days are over/ but still…’ This is both the shortest and the longest book I’ve seen. It’s the shortest and the longest advice ever given thus far.

I’m curious about how you’d define ‘Comtemporary art’.

An artist is ‘a journalist with artistic heart. ‘Sitting in front of a canvas holding a paint brush doesn’t make you an artist. The artist of this age has to be able to pull out the antenna within to connect what’s inside to the outside. ‘what is contemporary art?’ is a difficult question to answer. It’s like asking ‘What is contemporary food?’ As the saying ‘You see a painting only as much as you know it’ implies, true understanding of art can begin at the intersection of what you know and see. As an artists work is subjective, the audience’s eye also needs to be subjective in order to establish a relationship between the two. There is no reason for you to like an art piece just because others like it. The way you see and feel about a particular art piece changes in accordance to your experiences. There may be times when you start to see something in a piece, then there may be a time when all the things you saw and felt may suddenly vanish.

As involved as you are in creating a cover for Gwanghwamoon reconstruction, you must have been especially upset by the new of South-gate collapse. May I request Kang Ikjoong’s ‘Ode to South-gate’?

“south-gate has collapsed./ Tiles crumbled and pillars burned./ Japanese swords and scuffle between brothers made us wail sorrowfully./ Cheers of independence and screams during the World Cut made us laugh out loud./ the day of reunification was anxiously awaited./ No, South-gate did not collapse./ It’s just resting exhausted by six hundred years of history./ It will resurrect tomorrow letting go of its sorrow./ Under the same sky, on the same ground and amid the same screaming of cheer.”

Do you have a definite political stance?

I support Obama. He is relatively successful in providing hope and vision to Americans and in enabling Americans to dream of a new change. If he presents specific agenda as to what needs to be changed in what way, with definite strategy on national security and foreign policy, there is a good chance of victory in the presidential election. What we consider to be the basic responsibility of a political leader is ‘connector’. Someone who can connect east and west, south and north, therich and the poor, and the present and the future. This is only possible when you empty yourself like a pipe. This applies to politicians of any nation.

Your thoughts on the controversy over the import of American cows?

Issues concerning public health and sanitation should be placed ahead of political and economical theories. Americans will not necessarily like you more just because you say ‘yes’ at the negotiation table. The disappointment over our government’s negotiating skills, diplomatic skills, as well as its ability to communicate with its people just blew up all at once. In the midst of chaotic nights of candle demonstrations, we hauled in an enormous fish. It’s the start of personal broadcasting station in which anyone with a camera can air live shows by means of the internet. I believe that it will be recorded in history that the true ‘media current’ started in 2008 with candle demonstration against mad cow disease. Youtube may air dead, pre-recorded video whereas we air footage that’s as live as fresh fish jumping on a cutting board. Now that a strong, big net has been produced, what kinds of fish are to be caught in what way, and where to sell the fish are some issues for us to consider.

In the last piece of your book portraying your melancholic journey thus far. Kang Ikjoong, you say that “I want our country to be the mist beautiful (not the richest) country in the world. “What would you consider to be truly ‘beautiful’? And what is ‘the ultimate power of culture’ that you so “immensely want to own”?

The ‘harmonious country’ as portrayed in Kimgu’s ‘Beautiful Country’ is one that is unbiased. Like an acrobat walking on a thin line, you need to hold a stick with tradition and history on one side and future and vision on the other.

Culture is to thread as philosophy is to a needle. Like thread and needle, culture and philosophy need to be together at all times. When you sew onto a white cloth one stitch at a time with a needle called philosophy, you end up with a beautiful flower pattern called culture. Nation with a strong ‘power of culture’ is one that awakes ‘me’ with a needle called philosophy, then asks himself where he is standing and where he is going.

You stated that ” an artist is a storyteller who tells what he has seen upon climbing up a mountain.” Do you see the top of the mountain?

Student who studies where there isn’t an exam, artist who draws where there isn’t an exhibition, storyteller who climbs a mountain even during a rain storm… That is true student. true artist, and a true storyteller. I’m far from it.

Art Spiral / winter, 1991
Ssound Paintingss, Montclair State University, NJ

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. Kang uses some of the paintings to scrawl notes in his native Korean and in English. Many of them have cartoonish images in paint, ink or pencil. 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.” 2. “I want to make paintings that last forever.” 3. “I have to be a strong boxer.” 4. “I will never go to Atlantic City again.” 5. “I ate white ginseng = I will be somebody.” Kang will not treat to the mountains presently; he is busy trying to make sense of life in the big city.

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. Kang never leaves home without a blank canvas or two in his pockets. This modus operandi or two in his pockets. This modus operandi endows his art with utter immediacy. His work can be seen as a kind of Beat enterprise for the nineties. 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. For instance, one canvas announces, “I sold paintings to Prudential today. I want to eat sushi tonight.” Another depicts a somber male face (presumably the artist’s, possibly his father’s) 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. However, little revelations about art get more than equal time. Art means many things to Ik-Joong Kang: 1. “Art is Masturbation” 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. One canvas says, “Martin Wong,” beside a long-haired portrait of Wong himself. 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. Others are also deified. 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.

Art Net Magazine, July 1996
8,490 Days of Memory
The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris

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.

Art Asia Pacific / Number 19, 1998
LIVING ON THE EDGE
Borders and cultures in the work of Ik-Joong Kang

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 centimeter) 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 demilitarized 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 neighborhood 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 immigrated 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 lissome 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 counseling 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 neighborhoods 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 bric-a-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 coolers 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 satirizing stale hierarchies and undiscerning attitudes. 8490 Days of Memory, 1996, is Kang’s humorous perception of a once-powerful American colonizer, 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-meter 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 symbolizes 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 colonizer. 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 symbolizes 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 memorizing its cloisonné-like strips of Chinese characters. Comprised of ninety poplar panels, the elongated rectangular forms epitomize 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 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’.

In America Landing, Kang’s 1997 installation at the Kwangju Biennale, the colonizer and colonized become equals. Posing a statue of General MacArthur at one end of a thirteen-meter 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 Asian-American art.