Suki Seokyeong Kang: Mountain — Hour — Face presents Kang’s largest exhibition in the United States to date. The exhibition is co-curated by Ellen Bruss Chief Curator, Miranda Lash, and Associate Curator, Leilani Lynch, and features a wide array of over 70 artworks the artist has developed over the past several years.

Showcasing Kang’s deft use of materials — from traditionally woven grass mats, dyed wool, and mulberry paper, to industrial materials like steel and brass — to create wondrous and spiritual objects and installations, the exhibition brings the artist’s vision of the landscape into three dimensions. Sculptures, wall-based works, textiles, installations, and video will occupy the entirety of MCA Denver’s building and highlight her singular approach to engaging with these materials.

Kang’s practice is deeply connected with the natural world and our historical relationship to the landscape. Colorado’s abundance of rich natural resources, including our majestic mountains, essential water sources and expansive plains, present a fitting setting for Kang’s exhibition.

The formal experimentation and the visual exuberance of Suki’s work will be presented in a space deeply connected to the landscape and its abundance, ensuring a site-responsive presentation that will reinforce the power and beauty of her objects. The exhibition’s title Mountain — Hour — Face, can be read as a poetic phrase and by its individual components, utilizing the homonyms ​“hour” and ​“our” to suggest a reflection on the collective vision of humanity and nature.

About the artist

Suki Seokyeong Kang’s (b. 1977) research-driven practice spans across media, incorporating sculpture, painting, video, installation, and performance, as she investigates the notion of space and its relationship to an individual’s social position within society. Kang appropriates the formal language of the grid used in traditional Korean musical notation as a spatial and social structuring device. The grid is translated and reproduced as standing formations in her works that balance against, hinge on, and even protrude from the wall. In her works, the sculptures in the space appear and are further activated in her videos or performances. Hwamunseok — mats used in traditional Korean court dances — produced from woven sedge by Korean craftswomen. Each of these signals the minimum space an individual is provided in society. As these notations multiply, Kang configures them into a rich visual score suggesting the possibility of a collective consciousness rooted in individual action. 

 Suki Seokyeong Kang graduated with BFA and MFA in Oriental Painting at Ewha Womans University, and MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London. In 2018, Kang won the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel with her works acquired by Mudam Luxembourg. She has had solo exhibitions at Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2019−2020); Mudam Luxembourg (2018); ICA Philadelphia (2018). Her works have been featured in the Venice Biennale (2019); the Shanghai Biennale (2018); the Gwangju Biennale (2018); and the Liverpool Biennial (2018). Her work is currently on view at the at the Leeum Museum of Art exhibition Willow Drum Oriole. Kang lives and works in Seoul. 

Photo courtesy of Kukje Gallery