Suki Seokyeong Kang: Willow Drum Oriole

Leeum Museum of Art presents Willow Drum Oriole, a solo exhibition of one of Korea’s leading contemporary artists, Suki Seokyeong Kang. Experimenting with the expansive possibilities of painting as a medium through a variety of media and methods, including two dimensional work, sculpture, installation, video, and performance (“activations”), Suki Seokyeong Kang’s oeuvre encompasses a wide range of artistic, cultural, and social contexts that are at once traditional and contemporary. This exhibition, the largest institutional solo show of the artist to date, presents works that have been developed from previous series such as Jeong, Mora, Mat, and Grandmother Tower as well as Mountain, Ears, Hours, Column, and Floor, a new body of diversified work, including sculptural installations and a video

Willow Drum Oriole, the title of both the exhibition and a new video work, is a reference to the sages of yore who would read the movements and sounds of the oriole flying in and out of the leaves of willow trees, as if weaving a thread into the fabric of the landscape. Using this metaphor, the artist symbolically reveals a defining characteristic of her work: sensitivity to audiovisual and tactile awareness, combined with spatiotemporal experience. The exhibition unfurls like a landscape painting, spread across and resounding synesthetically through a three dimensional space; in it are mountains reifying the four seasons of the year, day and night stretched over the floor and walls, ears wide open and hovering in the air, narrow yet rich meadows and rounded figures roving around only to linger in place, and various rectangular frames creating spaces for each work, while invisibly delineating the composition of the exhibition. The structures created therein exude rich reverberations arising from between the frames and margins, warmth and coolness, softness and hardness, stillness and movement.

Suki Seokyeong Kang contemplates the territory that society grants to the individual and envisions a “true-view” landscape in which the presence and movement of those around us are perceived and interrelated. Although the works of the landscape each exist in different forms and ways, they collectively unravel a narrative of togetherness as they organically integrate and disperse. The artist thereby presents an arena in which I, you, and we exist wholesomely, persistently mediating our imbalances and differences.

Public programs to be held in conjunction with the exhibition include a curator’s talk by June Young Kwak (Head of Exhibitions, Leeum Museum of Art); a conversation between the artist Suki Seokyeong Kang, Zoe Whitley (Director of Chisenhale Gallery), and exhibition curator June Young Kwak; “Activation” supported by Bottega Veneta, Workshops inviting visitors to engage with Kang’s works synesthetically; and a Workbook program to guide groups through the meaning behind the artist’s oeuvre.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue that reads Kang’s practice through a range of varying discourses, such as the history of Korean painting, feminism, and the narratives of the Western avant-garde, with essays by June Young Kwak, Connie Butler (Director, MoMA PS1), Christine Kim (Britton Family Curator-at-Large, Tate), Michelle Kuo (Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA), Zoe Whitley (Director, Chisenhale Gallery). The catalogue will be published by Hatje Cantz.

Suki Seokyeong Kang’s solo exhibition Willow Drum Oriole is curated by June Young Kwak (Head of Exhibition, Leeum Museum of Art) with EJ Cho (Curator, Leeum Museum of Art) and in partnership with Bottega Veneta. 

Press Inquiries: Miso Han, PR Team, miso.han@samsung.com