Installation view of 《Fluidity and Thing》 © Atelier Aki

Atelier Aki will hold Junyoung Kang’s solo exhibition 《The Language of Home》 from April 6 to May 4. Through his first solo exhibition in four years, the artist poses questions about the space of home and what lies behind it, unfolding emotions and memories derived from his own experiences through the newly presented ‘Drawings over 2,000 Days’ series, as well as painting and ceramic works.

This exhibition presents the process of revealing, through artistic language, the intimate emotions that have accumulated behind the physical space called “home.” The artist has archived memories of emotions and stories derived from personal experiences in childhood, recording them on media such as painting, ceramics, and video, while expressing lyrical fragments of love.

The artist’s childhood was an accumulation of experiences moving between Korea and other countries. For him, who became thoroughly an outsider amid unfamiliar landscapes, the meaning of Korea and family came to be embodied in the image of the house where three generations lived together and the jars of his grandmother placed in the backyard. In his work, the most important keyword naturally came to be “home.”

Installation view of 《Fluidity and Thing》 © Atelier Aki

Home, a physical space that protects us from the external environment, in fact holds meanings as varied as its forms. For everyone who is born, home is the place where the first human relationships are formed, and it is where one stays the longest throughout life, giving rise to each person’s experiences and the emotions that accompany them. In this context, the artist explores the subject of “home,” which he has long examined, in greater depth and breadth. Home, where various forms of family are formed and where love, compassion, or conflict drawn out by their actions intersect, can be understood as a complex of emotions in itself.

This exhibition questions the countless emotions that remain unrevealed, bound to the form and word “home,” while also focusing on the home built upon various layers of love. The ‘Drawings over 2,000 Days’ series borrows from drafting, a physical act of architecture. Drafting is the process of clearly rendering the form, structure, size, materials, and methods of construction of a building into drawings using lines, letters, and symbols in order to convey the designer’s requirements to the builder. In Kang’s work, this process is transferred into drawings in which emotions collected from various homes are constructed through lines and planes, black and white, shapes and phrases.

Alongside this artistic drafting process, a new series of abstract house drawings, in which diverse colors and linear elements resonate, is also presented. These works look at home not as a structure built upon a material foundation, but as a space based on a psychological dimension. Ultimately, home is a psychological space woven from the varied emotions of various human beings. Furthermore, the artist asks questions about the existence of the “head of household,” who leads a family within each home.

Rather than as a product of the patriarchal system, used as another word for “husband” or as a synonym for “hoju,” the term varies in status and role across different family forms, from one- or two-person households to large families and multicultural families. Therefore, anyone can become the head of a household. The new work How to be a hero compares the head of household not to a male family head, but to an “everyday hero,” represented by a teddy bear that can be found anywhere.

The exhibition title 《The Language of Home》 is grammatically incorrect. It functions as an element that raises a question about “home,” which is used as a common noun indicating the name of an object. For Junyoung Kang, home is closer to language, as it contains the knowledge, beliefs, and worldview gained through the experiences of the community that uses it, forming the basis of human communication and thought while also influencing them. Therefore, “the language of home” is the psychological ground that supports the physical structure and contains countless emotions and stories that may also govern the mind of its user.

This exhibition shows a turning point in which the subject of home, which the artist has long explored, expands into “the language of home.” If his previous works showed homes built through lyrical love, this exhibition presents the abstract emotional ground created as the unpretty bare face of love contained in the language of home—anger and disillusionment, compassion and subordination, expectation and disappointment, and so on—explodes or condenses.

We are spending more difficult time than ever with COVID-19, but we have also come to spend more time at home than ever, gaining time to ask essential questions. The artist’s act of revealing intimate emotions about home will serve as a meaningful milestone in exploring our own homes through an affectionate gaze toward the relationships and lives that surround us.

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