I am so excited to introduce you to another talented Korean born artist who is showcasing his incredible works at the Jason J Kim Dental Aesthetics Lab.
I had an incredible time this week at the opening reception and artist talk at the Lab on Long Island for his exhibit Journey to the Past. Much has been written about TaiWoong Kang's work. The Wagner College Gallery wrote about on of his solo exhibits, "His abstraction comes close to the work of American abstract expressionists, while his sensational fusion of color and form is reminiscent of traditional Asian painting. and soul.
Kang’s distinctive look is accomplished by several different procedures. His hand-made wooden frames are covered with a collage of newspaper and then painted over. Each piece is finalized when combined with ceramic pieces that are representative of his hope to return to nature and move toward a more positive and idealistic future. There is a genuine complexity of form in his mixed-media pieces that includes unique, unusual components like ceramic shards and coffee, showing him to be an unusually inventive spirit, even for an artist."
Take a look at some of the great photos of me and colleagues enjoying the opening reception and meeting this talented artist!
Check out this review by Jonathan Goodman (Critic/ Publish Writer for Art in America, Sculpture, and Art Asia Pacific, Former Artnews editor)
TaiWoong Kang: An Art of Wonder
TaiWoong Kang is an artist as generous in his nature as he is accomplished in his skills. He connects to the world mainly through the vehicle of the dream, which he acknowledges as both “the fulfillment of wish and hope” and an “elusive experience.” He wishes to address both conscious and subconscious experience as expressions of “daily life and the dream world.” By this Kang means that he is concerned, like many Asian artists today, with rendering a formal language of genuinely spiritual value, a way not only of seeing the world but also a means of being in it. His easy command of the idiom of abstraction comes close in its compositional strength to the work of well-known American abstract-expressionists such as Hans Hofmann and Willem de Kooning; however, at the same time, it may be said that Kang’s fusion of color and form also has precedents in traditional Asian painting. In the series “Dream and Daily Life,” we can see how the artist has worked up a private language of dreaming that is, for all its mystery, also a language comfortable in the public domain. Kang’s layers of organic forms tell us how a sense of completion may be won through the interlocking and weaving of amorphous shapes filled with color, which ride next to and over each other with accomplished ease.
The artist, who was born in Korea in 1961 and educated at Chung-Ang University of Fine Art in Seoul, receiving his B.F.A. and M.F.A. there in 1986 and 1990, respectively, graduated in 2001 with an M.A. in studio art from Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. It is clear to the viewer that, in response to his time in America, Kang has not only continued to develop as an artist but also has become an explorer, trying his hand with earthenware and stoneware fired sculptures, as well as computer graphic media. His acrylic-on-canvas paintings have become, if anything, even more diverse and complicated, their layers overlapping in a powerful simulation of exchange between forms and colors. There is a genuine complexity of form in Kang’s art-in the most recent works, especially. His mixed-media pieces include ceramic components and coffee, showing him to be an artist of an unusually inventive spirit. As Kang himself points out, he intends “to cover both consciousness and unconsciousness in the relation between daily life and the dream world.” The diverse technical strategies-as seen in both the way Kang works and the materials he uses-only underscores the multiplicity of his interests, as well as his need to unify his many concerns into a single compositional field.
It is a difficult thing to attain such a unity; and with a hand as skilled as Kang’s, it would be easy for the artist to take on the pleasures of facility in color and structure. Yet Kang’s acute understanding of the dream enables him to present art that merges the intuitive with the more openly rational. His sense of place in an abstract composition is considerably inspired; he sees the gesture as a freedom to move about, rather than as the cliché it has unfortunately become in many contemporary artists’ art. In the sense that he still believes in the capability of painting to render the nearly bottomless depths of the psyche, he may be understood as a traditional artist, albeit one whose sense of whimsy and form is especially new. His technical abilities have resulted in a language of openness and even joy, so committed is the artist to “accommodate both of these mental stages (consciousness and unconsciousness) in my form of art.” One can imagine well enough that painting underscores the connection between the seen and the unseen, that is to say the known and the unknown, and it becomes clear that Kang’s ambition is to document the ties that bind us to the ongoing excitement of an unknown narrative, which comes to a halt only with the ending of life. Kang is a strong artist who has devoted himself to recognizing the more or less infinite language of abstract painting, whose enjoyable freedoms are to be contrasted with our darker awareness of life passing. By opening his art to a magnanimous course, Kang not only supports the best of humanity, he underscores his art’s large theme-the presentation of the human in abstract terms, in a language that claims the best of us as viewers, as fellow travelers making our way along a half-recognized, nearly understood path.
