Movement 2178, 72 x 89 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2021
Riverside Gallery presents an exhibition in commemoration of the artist Taiwoong Kang (1961 - 2024). The exhibition will be from April 20 to 24, 2024, and a commemorative ceremony will be held on April 20, Saturday, from 4 pm to 7 pm.
Kang’s artistic vision revolved around the idea of “movement,” which to him represented the life force uniting and influencing everything.
Kang wrote in his artist statement: “If there is anything that perseveres eternally, that would be the earnest movement that is the ‘gathering as life.’”
According to the art critic Jae-Geol Lee, Kang’s works elicit the idea of “difference and becoming” written by Gilles Deleuze (1925 - 1995), who developed two central philosophical concepts of pure difference and complex repetition and revealed that the two are related. (Difference implies divergence and decentering, while repetition is associated with displacement and disguising.) Lee writes, “as this world is an unpredictable chaos existing as probability, it is a kind of lack of order prior to order, and a flow that cannot be fixed. The painting style of Taiwoong Kang is likely based on this kind of world view where the phenomena of moving and advancing are accompanied by the traces of disappearance, image is accompanied by an act, and a particle is accompanied by a wave.”
About the Artist and His Work:
TaiWoong Kang was born in Sinan, South Jeolla, South Korea. Having attended elementary school in Mokpo, Kang received both his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Chung-Ang University in 1986 and 1990. He immigrated to the United States in 1998. He received his M.A. from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania in 2001 and worked as an artist based in New York. He has moved back to South Korea since 2012 and was a professor at Chung-Ang University College of Arts.
Since moving to the United States 20 years ago, one of the main goals of TaiWoong Kang as an artist was to reconnect and communicate with nature through utilizing both two-dimensional and three-dimensional mediums in his work. Alternating between complementary colors that have stark contrasts to more subdued analogous colors, Kang’s exploration of the relationships between colors and projecting the various energies that emanate from them captivates the eye.
Another crucial component of Kang’s works is the element of gesture in which he records his physical movements by manipulating multiple layers of paint by splattering, dripping and scraping, resulting in an infinite number of colorful specks and unique textures overlapping onto the surface. Within the constant layering and disclosing of these painterly marks emerge new abstract forms that actively move across the canvas. It is this dynamic, which represents Kang’s message of hope that all things in nature would move towards the restoration of humanity from the effects of the corrupted world.
Additional Info:
Illusion and Materiality 2023 Group Exhibition