Kang Hong-goo, Position of Artist, 2024, acrylic on digital pigment print, 119×100cm.

Kang Hong-goo departs from the grammar of straight photography, making an intervention through techniques such as image compositing and hand-coloring on photographs, and engages the medium as a way to reflect on reality. The image “disguised” as a photograph becomes a critical gaze toward concealed realities. Subverting photography’s expected effects becomes the methodological basis of Kang’s practice of image making.

From the moment he embraced photography as his main medium, Kang positioned himself as an image searcher or analyst, treating photography as one among various visual media. His 1999 solo exhibition Position, Snob, Fake (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul) revealed his view of South Korean society as a contested field of image politics. Here, “Position” invokes South Korea’s geopolitical location, the division of the country, and existential questions about one’s actions and what it means to be an artist. “Snob” exposes and critiques the snobbish desires that pervade society, and “Fake” reflects the artist’s suspicion that within a capitalist-driven life, the everyday experience and images that permeate it may be false or illusory. Kang’s articulation around his ideas of “Position, Snob, Fake” revealed through this work is an ongoing inquiry in an era of intensified capitalism and image politics, signaling his persistent attitude toward photography and reality. For this exhibition, he revisits his early works, Who am I (1998) and the Fugitive series (1996), originally created through Photoshop compositing, and reimagines them using AI technologies to produce works such as Dinosaur (2024), Balloon (2024), and Self-Portrait 1986 (2025). This approach becomes his self-deprecating take as an image intervener, asserting his stance in today’s post-truth era, marked by fake news and fabricated images.

His first solo exhibition in 1992 featured Self-Portrait (1992) and The Token (1992), works that already reveal his early experiments with photography as a medium using a hand-held scanner. The series Who am I and Fugitive presents a critical self-reflection and artistic statement within the Korean art scene. Kang often positioned himself as a “B-grade” artist, sometimes likening himself to a “promenader,” a “fugitive,” or a “trainee.” Such self-positioning shapes both his photographic viewpoint on reality and a pointed remark upon it. Position of Artist (2024), a work in which the artist paints over a photograph, envisions the artist as a craftsman, drawing an analogy to a construction-site laborer. This reflection finds an antecedent in his earlier painting, Daikon and Rice Bowl (1992), created before his turn to photography, which depicts farming and a rice bowl to think about survival and the foundations of life.

Meanwhile, Kang’s photographs of familiar yet estranged landscapes, the looming fear of war in everyday life, and leisure time embedded in capitalist systems enact a mode of defamiliarization, revealing the underlying reality of life.

His “pseudo-panorama” photograph refrains from offering a vision of urban space; instead, they expose the relations between rural and urban settings, redevelopment zones, empty lots in Seoul, and the paradoxical, hybrid spaces where capital and power intersect with “green.” These stitched-together photographs expose fissures within the panoramic frame, conjuring a “distorted Seoul” and unfolding a reality akin to a “Möbius strip of space and time.”

Nayoungim & Gregory Maass, Minnie Mouse, 2025, embroidery on knit, frame, 60×40×4cm.

Nayoungim & Gregory Maass, 10 sleazy Pieces, 2025, mixed media, variable dimensions.

Nayoungim & Gregory Maass repurpose objects and events that have grown old and lost their function, recombining multiple perspectives and motivations to reactivate them within a contemporary context. Their practice goes beyond the formal recombination of sculptural objects and everyday items, operating as a platform where art history, the history of the medium, everyday life, mass media, visual culture, and psychoanalysis intersect in layered ways.

Nayoungim & Gregory Maass (hereafter N & GM) have carried out curatorial projects such as Kim Kim Gallery, which positions itself as a gallery yet operates without a fixed physical location, organizing a continuous series of events through

curatorial initiatives and collaborative networks. They have also pursued artist publishing as a means of appropriating and subverting the structures and systems of art. N & GM’s conceptual approach refuses to remain with a single object, instead forging connections that cause worlds to converge and collide, producing something unprecedented. “Frankensteining” and “Psychobuilding” describe the process by which readymade and found objects, as well as disparate things and worlds, are recombined and reanimated into hybrid forms, defining both the nature of N & GM’s practice and their methodology.

For N & GM, the self cannot define itself but comes into being through relations. Like their statement, “I will be/am somebody else today,”_* their work resists fixity, continually renewing itself through ongoing flows of thought and working methodologies. No subject, they suggest, can sustain an absolute, singular identity; it must inevitably transform in response to its time.

The artist book Diarrhea: Causes, Symptoms & Treatment (2025) takes its title from a pun on the homophones “Diarrhea” and “Diary,” playing on their similar pronunciation to create a double meaning. This book situates between mental illness and creativity, feedback loops and the interior and exterior of the living body, self-state and identity, the Korean dream stone (suseok) and Henry Moore’s orificing, black holes, and the concepts of emptiness (gong), void (heo), nothingness (mu), and self-death—unfolding the entanglement of disparate cultures, bodies of knowledge, systems, and everyday life. N & GM selected ten concepts from the books and developed them into the installation 10 sleazy Pieces (2025), presented in the gallery.

In their characteristic practice of appropriating homophones, slang, and catchy phrases, 10 sleazy Pieces evokes either a mistranslation of the 1970 film Five Easy Pieces or a playful variation of “10 easy pieces,” suggesting something simple, monotonous, and easy to learn. For this installation, however, the title is used ironically to underscore the complexity and abstrusity that define N & GM’s work.

10 sleazy Pieces engages with concepts such as “phantuhsee [fantasy], 2 cute alert, the UV (uncanny valley) effect, entraining paintings, orificing/orification, equivalence, calligraphy, legendary, Frankensteining, and Psychobuilding,” while simultaneously inter-referencing, transforming, and reconfiguring them.

_{*Nayoungim & Gregory Maass, Diarrhea-Causes, symptoms & Treatment, trans. Lee Hanbum (Seoul: rasunpress, 2025)}

Oksun Kim, chn_trr430, 2025, archival pigment print, 125×100cm.

Oksun Kim, untitled_hawon1528, 2015, archival pigment print, 100×80cm.

Oksun Kim, large stream atlas, 1962-2025, archival pigment print, digital c-print, variable dimensions (31).

The questions Oksun Kim poses to herself become a way to understand her own being and a journey that extends toward others. In her photographic practice, the artist captures moments of encounters through still images, while the subjects—their faces, voices, and intimate narratives—are rendered in moving images.

Oksun Kim’s video Home (2023) traces the artist’s travels and interviews with three women, including a second-generation Zainichi Korean, a Korean woman residing in Japan, and a marriage migrant. Scenes of the artist traveling by boat, train, and motorcycle reflect not only her documentary journey to meet others but also evoke the fluid identities of those who have moved beyond fixed places. The national identity is not fixed but performatively mutable. The identity of “Korean” now signifies those who can no longer live as Koreans in the traditional sense, forms of existence transformed through displacement and distance from their origin. Thus, “home” is not a destination to which one returns, but an origin that is destined to change. In Kim’s photographs and videos, “walking palm tree” appear as metaphors for those rendered foreign within society—beings grafted into other cultures, hybrid and queer existences.

For this exhibition, the artist assembles an image atlas that interweaves intimate personal narratives with images of individuals who embody identities and communities invoked by historical discourse. Her work combines “H,” an old family

photograph, portraits of internationally married women, inter cultural youth_*, tropical palm trees, waves, and rocks—images that commingle in a dispersed constellation. Photographs from several series—including Happy Together (2002–2005), No Direction Home (2008–2010), The Shining Things (2012–2014), Riverside Portraits (2017–2020), Berlin Portraits (2019), Park Portraits (2019–2020), Woman in A Room (1996–2001), Walking Palm Tree (2021–2023), Adachi Portraits (2023), and Brides, Sara (2023)—return to their origins while generating new narratives. These earlier typological photo series are reconfigured in the image atlas as a composite temporality where past and future intersect.

If the camera’s viewpoint in Happy Together maintained a measured distance from its subjects, this work begins with “H,” a figure who is closely connected to the artist. From this intimate point of departure, Kim develops a process of self articulation that bridges temporal divides between the past and the future. Rooted in this autobiographical gesture, Kim’s photographic practice extends into movements toward others, revealing the stories and faces of those whose lives have been dispersed by national histories and who drift across cultural boundaries, carrying their narratives with them. Personal narratives and selves omitted from dominant social and historical frameworks, as well as standardized ways of life, converge in Kim’s images to forge a sense of solidarity.

_{* cultural backgrounds, including those from families of international or intercultural marriage, children of marriage migrants, children of foreign workers, children of international students, and children of refugees etc.}

Ha Cha Youn, Sweet Home, 2004, single-channel video, color, sound, 2 min 29 sec.

Grounded in her own condition, Ha Cha Youn turns her attention to those living in a state of perpetual impermanence—people who must always be ready to leave, whose lives unfold in cycles of settling and departing until this rhythm becomes a way of being, encompassing refugees, migrants, and outsiders. For the artist, “localisation” is both survival and a demand for the minimum conditions of human life. To live as an artist is to secure even a temporary foothold, a minimal space to exist, however provisional or precarious.

Living in a European city, Ha witnesses the struggles faced by immigrants, the homeless, and refugees within the shifting landscape of Europe’s political climate. Having sustained her artistic life in constant motion, she takes an interest in those displaced by France’s immigration policies and urban renewal measures. In this sense, “localisation” is inseparable from the question of surviving as an artist, and anchoring oneself within a life in motion. The artist documents the living conditions she has witnessed among these social others through photography and video, and evokes their lives through performance and installation. From the position of an outsider, the simplest act available to her was to document—a minimal gesture through which the presence of marginalized lives comes into view.

Ich bin Künstlerin—I’m an Artist (1999), created in Hanover, Germany, stages the artist seated beneath an advertisement billboard on a straw mat, accompanied by a sign reading “I’m female artist” and a plastic bowl, disclosing her own circumstances at the time. In Sweet Home (2004), Ha responds to the armrests installed on Paris subway benches to deter homeless people from sleeping, intervening by attaching Styrofoam blocks to devise an alternative way to lie down.

This performance, documented on video, later turned into the Sweet Home series, expanding into installations, photographs, performances, and video works.

Ha has continued to create works that metaphorically address those pushed to the city’s peripheries, individuals considered socially vulnerable. Consigne (2005–2006) is a slideshow of images that document the personal belongings of the homeless, stored in the branches of roadside trees after the French government banned tents along the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Yeongdeungpo (2013) documents the cramped realities of living in small jjockbang rooms in Seoul’s Yeongdeungpo district, capturing the artist’s performative acts of moving and piling her baggage—luggage, briquette ash, bedding, wastepaper boxes, empty flowerpots—through the camera lens. Jjockbang (2013, Reproduction in 2025) is an installation that recreates the dimensions of a room so small that a person can barely lie down. Within this space, video footage from Paris, Seoul, Yeongdeungpo, and Hanover converges, revealing the temporal and spatial interstices that mark the artist’s presence across these sites.

Kim Jipyeong, Without Fears, 2022, muk (black ink), gold leaf and mixed pigment on lacquered hanji (Korean handmade paper), 148×105cm.

Kim Jipyeong, Munbangsawu: The Four Precious Things of Scholars and Painters, 2023, muk (black ink), pencil, and white pigment on wrinkled hanji (Korean handmade paper), 63×90cm.

Kim Jipyeong takes notice of traditions that have often been marginalized within the dominant discourses of art history, literature, and Eastern-style painting. The artist seeks to revitalize materials, motifs, and concepts once deemed taboo or excluded from Eastern-style painting, while recalling what lies outside its boundaries—oral narratives such as myths and folktales, awkwardly rendered folk paintings by anonymous artists, and heterogeneous presences displaced from the mainstream—uncovering what has been omitted in the interstices of institutionalized tradition.

Paintings Lost (2021) signals both the absence of paintings that survive only in writing and the broader absence of tradition in the present. Here, “absence” is not only the current social condition in which traditions are marginalized, but also a space full of potential for recalling what has been excluded and for reimagining what exists outside the boundaries of tradition.

Kim revisits the stories of obscure painters—figures scarcely known yet recorded like legends—and anonymous folk painters, the “masters outside the canon,” to rewrite narratives of art history and tradition from another vantage point. “Paintings Lost” serves as a “story from the margins,” where suppressed narratives surface and unfold. Beginning with literary traces that write about painting—poems, critical texts, and anecdotes—the series interrogates absent traditions and gaps within art history. Rather than simply transcribing text into image, Kim adopts the very impossibility of representation as a painterly method. Works such as Poem and Powder (2023), based on a poem by Joseon scholar So Se-yang written in response to a landscape painting by Shin Saimdang; A Letter (2025), drawn from a letter in which writer Heo Gyun asked painter Lee Jeong to depict his house and garden; and Monkey and Graveyard (2025), inspired by a legend of a monkey that lived with literati painter Choi Susung, wept at his grave after Choi was falsely accused and executed, having written a final poem before his death, all draw upon fantastical narratives embedded in tradition.

The artist remarks that she feels a sense of freedom in these “lost traditions,” noting the potential liberation and latent possibilities. In this process, the “lost tradition” paradoxically returns as something present, opening a space for reinterpretation. The artist invites “friends from Afar,” such as animals and ghosts from mythical tales, females who are mostly situated outside of sanctioned tradition, and folk paintings where the author is unknown, into her painting. Imaginative and othered beings, summoned from histories that once overlooked them, erupt into dynamic energies as an expression of the artist’s response to tradition.

Munbangsawu: The Four Precious Things of Scholars and Painters (2023) recalls a tale in which inkstone, ink stick, paper, and brush, mourning their faded glory, are consoled by a scholar who writes a funerary oration (jemun) and buries them with care. The artist poses the question: “Can this era be considered whole when certain histories and traditions are dismissed as anachronistic?”_* It prompts a reconsideration of the value of what is labeled obsolete and what is in decay.

_{*Kim Jipyeong, Han Yuna et al, Friends from Afar (Seoul: Tigress on Paper, 2025), 204.}

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