Kang’s praxis since graduating from Chelsea College of Arts has increasingly hinged on ideas of presence and dislocation, the personal and the ‘other’. Through the phase-transitions of disappearing and reappearing, ordering and re-ordering Kang offers the viewer a re-enchantment of the everyday: here art is alchemy - constantly in flux, always in the making.
In Nomadic Buoy #1 Kang plays both visible and invisible agent of change; an untethered marker at loose in the world. In the first of two videos the artist can be seen upending the contents of an anonymous apartment – rearranging furniture, books, artworks etc - a visible poltergeist jinxing the illusion of domestic bliss: in the second, a near identical disordering happens but by unseen, unheimlich forces. In both instances the resultant pell-mell pile of commodities resembles the everyday sculpture of the discarded, as regularly seen on street corners and at rubbish tips; the (in)visible fall out from over-production and consumer meltdown revealed in the process.
Similar themes of fragility and determination echo through Kang’s process – from the over-sized pink-paper blooms that carpet a gallery walkway in Azalea (2015) to You Are (2017), where a sapling, planted in a smattering of earth, on top of a side-table stuck in the mudflats of a coastal estuary faces, Canute-like, the rising tide that seemingly threatens its frail purchase on survival. In our concern for the ‘natural’ – as evidenced in the faces of visitors walking gingerly on the fake flowers of Azalea or our own as we watch the waters rise around a small tree - the third-nature matrices of our preconceptions and beliefs are often revealed and rent: nothing is as it seems - the mighty may fall, the weakest can survive. Yet there is no doubting that we all are adrift at sea now, desperately seeking even a nomadic buoy to cling to in our fears for the future and our ambitions for today.
For The structure of a History (2021) the artist is captured in the daily routine of eating and drinking during London’s extended ‘lockdown’ response to the Coronavirus pandemic. The detritus of familiar comestibles – croissants, juices, coffee, dumplings, soup - slowly grows, as plates and bowls stack one on top of the other, gradually filling the expanse of white table upon which she imbibes them. A still life spreading across 66 films and as many days, the structure of this ‘History’ grows until it fills the screen in a jumble of leftovers, a catalogue of what remains.
Through the constant repetition and re-tracing of actions and routines in her workings Kang offers us a broken mirror in which we are reflected grappling with our circumstances but through which we can also glimpse the redundancy that lies behind this beguiling silvered screen. In this spy-glass can be seen the daily grind of both Sisyphean and more earthly toils; humans of the 21st century sat befuddled by new rules and strategies for living, the consumer-spectators frozen in the cold shadow of a systemic collapse of ‘things’ as they were. And yet – amidst all the death and wanton destruction – beauty somehow maintains and abides.
That a relentless optimism persists (despite the Spectacle’s slow strangulation of the real) suggests a smile - not just a rictus grin - can still be located in the memento mori of our once-and-future-Spectacle. And Kang’s work - sensual, hypnotic, staccato, tracing transition and refashioning time and place again and again – aids us in remembering that life can still flourish in the cracks of the monolithic Now - and here Seulgi Kang’s art chimes with the motivations of many Fluxus projects - begs us question the orthodoxies and conceptual hierarchies of our everyday existence as we set-out in the search for our ‘truths’
By David Dorrell
Email
kkseulgi@gmail.com
@seulgikangx
@seulgikangx