Two Mountains and a Swimming Pool

SOLO EXHIBITION
YUJIN KANG

August.28 - January.15.2021

Video by Ian Lee

“I try to merge different subject matters that attract my attention in order to create an image that induces a positive visual experience…I deliberately manifest the tension between materiality and the representation of the subject matter and try to balance these two distinct elements.”

Two Mountains and A Swimming Pool debuts a new body of paintings by Korean-born artist Yujin Kang. Opening, August 28 - November 4, 2020, the exhibition presents Kang’s lush, boldly colored works, which the artist produced in 2018 and 2019. Best known for her layered interpretations of city- and landscapes, travel has played an increasingly important role in Kang’s practice in recent years. Depicting pools, beaches, and holiday resort scenes, these works are partly the result of her travels and residencies in recent years. Marking a change from her previous body of work, which mainly concentrated on artificial, ordered city-scapes, these works revel in wide-open spaces, signaling the artist’s new focus on natural landscapes. Noting that these works are her desire to “possess these images in my own way”, Kang’s paintings are constructed as narrative-like scenes that reflect the artist’s subjective experiences of the environments she’s immersed in. This will be the artist’s first collaboration with OPENART Advisory, and a total of twelve works are available exclusively for the duration of this exhibition.

Kang’s paintings toe the line between reality and illusion — in her works, elements are exaggerated, perspectives skewed, and subject matters jumbled together. Serving almost as a visual diary of her explorations around holiday destinations, Kang’s practice reflect a surreal energy that remains, at the same time, emotionally resonant. In works such as Pool with Holly Bush (2019), palm tree leaves morph into a holly bush that grow rampantly above a clear swimming pool. As Kang describes, “I add elements to my subject matter to intentionally disturb the peace. I will exaggerate a natural element of the subject matter to create unease and imbalance…The painting is a collective sum of different emotions and feelings, which hopefully evoke similar emotions and feelings in the viewer.” Such painterly interventions reveal the artist’s working process; Kang composites photographs that she herself took with those found on the internet, producing a bricolage of sorts within each work where tensions between literal and figurative narratives play out across the picture plane. 

Many of Kang’s paintings — and in particular, those depicting swimming pools—are the result of her technical mastery of her chosen medium: thick, glossy enamel paint. Dripped, swirled, and scraped across the surface of the canvas, Kang allows enamel paints to mix, creating blurry, almost abstract sections within several of her paintings. Enamel paint dries to a shiny finish as well; Kang writes that this allows light to reflect off the surface of the painting,  revealing a tendency of the painting itself to “obstruct the audience’s view… As the audience views my paintings in and out of the picture plane, their view becomes fluid.” In Pool with Ice Cream (2019), thick pink streaks of paint drip down the side of a mountain; the nebulous forms of the mountainsides stand in contrast to the crisp, clear outline of the swimming pool that it overlooks. Throughout the paintings on view, recurring motifs of waves and mountain views are often left as poured masses of enamel paint, leaving the concluding image to float between representation, and the depiction of expressive, metaphorical scene-scapes. Kang’s complex, layered works are as much an intimate investigation of her own emotional responses as they are of her various environments. As she describes, “I still paint the outward appearance of my subject matter, but my emotional distance [from the work] varies as I paint it.” Her fresh, vivid works hence evoke the wonder and beauty of natural landscapes, but also invite us to view them through the artist’s own nuanced convergence of external and internal vantage points.

Throughout her practice, Kang often experiments with the two-dimensional format of painting in a process of perceiving, selecting, and depicting visual information. Demonstrating her own intuitive synthesis of sights and spectacles, Kang’s works are the result of her desire and impulse to express the visible images which hold her attention, and to transfer them onto the plane of the picture through the prism of her unique perspective.

“The material characteristic of enamel paints is very effective in showing fluidity. When enamel paints are dripped or poured, they randomly mix with each other on the surface and allow for ‘accidents’ to happen. Such coincidence discourages literal depiction of forms and rather reveals abstract components to the fullest extent. Also, the enamel paint’s glossy finish tends to obstruct the audiences’ view, which prevent them from looking at the depicted images, and reflects light off the surface when out of view.”

JUNNI CHEN | CURATOR

Junni Chen is a Singapore-born, New York-based independent curator. She has served as the Director of Exhibitions and Programs at Helwaser Gallery, New York, and curated Boedi Widjaja: Declaration of (September 11 - November 7, 2019) as part of the gallery’s exhibition program. This exhibition is the third in the line-up of projects that examined contemporary practices dealing with the notion of modernity, following Anton Ginzburg: VIEWs, and Christina Kruse: Base and Balance. Alongside the gallery’s program, she maintains an interest in examining the communication of Southeast Asian histories through visual forms. Previously, she served as Curatorial Assistant in the National Gallery Singapore, as part of the curatorial team of Artist and Empire: (En)countering Colonial Legacies (2016). Her writing work primarily centers on contemporary artistic practices in Singapore, having written for multiple exhibition and artist texts/catalogues, as well as for publications such as Art Radar Journal. She is a current candidate of the MA program in Art History, Criticism and Conservation at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York.