In the video Black Mat Oriole, two performers create an elegant dance with Suki Seokyeong Kang’s (b. 1977, Seoul) various objects and sculptures against a pitch-black background, their movements as if suspended in time. One of the actors holds a circular block in his hands as he walks slowly across the stage, passing through other floor-based circular mats along the way. Another actor is seen pushing a metallic sheet rested on top of a rectangular block. On the pastel-colored sheet are circular holes that form some sort of a pattern.
Black Mat Oriole is part of a larger series by Kang that draws on the spatial narrative from Chunaengmu (春鶯舞), a form of solo Korean Court dance developed in in 1828 by Crown Prince Hyomyeong. Chunaengmu requires its performers to move with restraint on a square-shaped traditional rush-woven mat. Kang’s scenography comprises of an ensemble of sculptures, frames, fabrics, paintings: rotating frames on wheels, wheels on legs that rest on a round wooden base, round cylinders of metal and wood atop one another, paintings stacked on a black mat. Her works often wander around the floor, rest on walls, and even lean on each other – audiences are invited to compose their own choreographies with Kang’s work.
In another video, Black Under Colored Moon (2015), two performers interact with Kang’s frame-like sculptures, which draw heavily from the Korean musical notation system developed in the 15th century, Jeongganbo, the first Asian musical notation system to depict both pitch and duration. As the two performers silently turn, flip, and rotate the metallic frames that form Kang’s abstract, geometric Jeong (井) sculptures, spaces that occupy, overlap, and cut across different planes are created, inhabited, and communicated. Indeed, Jeongganbo is an apt metaphor for Kang’s practice, which continuously tries to bring into visibility the different ways time and space intertwines, and the agency of human bodies in such situations. MW
self-presentation:
I am interested in the mediations and encounters that occur from the incongruous conditions that recur throughout history. The units that make up my works and their compositions are my unmediated and sensuous efforts to sustain the wisdom of ancient texts, such as lyrics, musical scores, and poems, which exist in futility and reverberate aimlessly in an age that favors the new. Mv works visualize the subtle processes in which these texts—segmented verses in a poem, or ideographs—come together, functioning as a medium that links the iterative transformation of recurring ideas that have repeated itself throughout the course of history. The spatial-temporal balance of restraint and spontaneity, void and abundance, allegorical figurations and their vestiges expressed in the form of paintings, sculptures, videos, and movements are my attempts to reconcile the uncertainties and dissonance that have shaped the history of civilization into an integrated, visual whole. This synthesis, along with the ceaselessly recurring and proliferating forms and the imperfect union of these forms, may betray the incongruity of human existence.
