Young Gil Kang “LIMBO”

Tenri Cultural Institute

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Tenri Cultural Institute presents the solo Exhibition LIMBO: Young Gil Kang.

Young Gil Kang’s works are concerned with life’s ambiguity, uncertainness, and transience. He represents contemporary life and its meaning by focusing with his camera on the subject the swimmer in a metaphorical way. By treating a new conversational topic and examining the boundaries between photograph and painting, the artist excites the viewer’s curiosity. Kang is interested in depicting the abstract meaning of life while trying to discover its meaning. His reasoning for doing this is to discover life’s comprehensive meaning through a series of steps that disassemble and recompose his target. He explains that “when the subject lays face up in the water, he faces the fear of extinction until he can regain composure through association with the embryonic experience.” He exposes the fear of living in the contemporary world where uncertainty and ambiguity loneliness, and irony is part of people’s daily life. Security thus, is to be found in the latter that becomes the protective environment.

There are connecting threads between Kang’s thought process and his title Limbo. Limbo is a word young people use these days when they are in a situation where their feelings swing up and down and the direction of their lives have become unclear. Thus, he chose one Korean actress as a model for his work by thinking of the relationship between her as an individual and as actress who takes on other roles a situation that greatly resembles Kang’s work.

Kang’s photographs depict an afterimage much like that of haze after light has passed between water, and a human body or other object. Furthermore, it exposes an aesthetic visualization with vivid colors by emphasizing color mixtures and contrasts.

Kang is a photographer based in Korea. He received his MFA at the Ecole de communication visuelleprivee in Paris, and his BFA at Seoul Arts University in Korea. He has exhibited widely in South Korea, China and France, and this is his New York debut.