Kang Hong-Goo was born on an island in Sinan, Jeollanam-do. He graduated from Mokpo National University of Education. He taught at an elementary school on an island for six years before returning to school to study painting at Hongik University, where he also completed his graduate degree. He currently lives in Seoul and has served as the director of the Goeun Museum of Photography.
“When I revisited my hometown islands of Shinan around 2005 after
a long time, everything that had once been so familiar to me since childhood
appeared strangely unfamiliar, as if I were seeing it for the first time. That
sensation—something like déjà vu experienced through jamais vu—signified an
immense gap between my memory and the reality before my eyes.”— Kang Hong-Goo¹
One and J. Gallery presents the solo exhibition 《The Sea of Shinan – Mud, Sand, and Wind》 by
Kang Hong-Goo (b. 1956) from June 16 to July 24, 2022. This exhibition marks
the artist’s seventh solo exhibition at One and J. Gallery.
Over more than 30 years of artistic practice, Kang Hong-Goo has
presented a series of active exhibitions at One and J. Gallery, beginning with 《The House》(2010), followed by 《Study of Green》(2012), 《House of Human Beings – Proxemics Busan》(2013),
《Underprint: Sparrow and Jajangmyeon》(2015), 《Mist and Frost – Ten Years》(2017), and 《Study of Green – Seoul – Vacant
Lot》(2020).
Since the early 1990s, Kang has presented digital photographs that
capture and composite the realities of Korean society. From the 2000s onward,
he has portrayed the faces of cities—Seoul, Gyeonggi-do, Cheongju, Busan, and
others—undergoing transformation through capitalism, including villages left in
ruins by redevelopment, using both digital photography and painting.
The 2022 solo exhibition 《The Sea of Shinan – Mud, Sand, and Wind》
functions as an introduction that opens the vast body of work in which Kang
Hong-Goo documented the islands and seascapes of Shinan County in
Jeollanam-do—composed of over 1,000 islands—over a period of 17 years.
Although Shinan was a familiar place to the artist as an insider
who spent his childhood there, returning after several decades of living in
Seoul caused him to encounter it anew through the gaze of an outsider. The
coexistence of familiarity rooted in personal memory and the strangeness of
present-day reality led the artist to question and record this “gap” over a
long period of time.
In 《The Sea of
Shinan – Mud, Sand, and Wind》, this inquiry is
presented through 29 works, including photographs, photo-based paintings, and
collages. As indicated by the exhibition’s subtitle, the exhibition primarily
introduces Shinan through landscapes centered on “mud,” “sand,” and “wind.”
In the second half of 2022, a touring exhibition is scheduled to
take place in Shinan County, the primary site of the works. In 2023, a
large-scale solo exhibition is planned that will bring together the lives and
landscapes of people living in Shinan into a comprehensive presentation.
