Kun Kang

Sur une Île isolée

Galerie Vazieux presents the work of Korean artist Kun Kang for the first time. The exhibition “Sur une Île isolée” (On an Isolated Island), which runs from June 17 to July 1, brings together his recent creations produced in the spring during his residency at the “H du siège” art center in Valenciennes, as well as older sculptures.

Masks, self-portraits, disturbing figures and hybrid creatures are all visual embodiments of Kun Kang’s inner landscape. The artist weaves portraits on a skeleton of needles to form faces through a network of intersecting threads. With boldness and meticulousness, he assembles materials – fur, pearls, fabrics – and composes strange, fantastical beings. He mixes soft materials, such as wool and feathers, with transparent resins to harden them, before superimposing them to create astonishing volumes with animal silhouettes. Kun Kang’s choice of materials reveals as much her taste for plastic exploration as for their symbolism and reference to human relationships and the construction of the “self”.

Kun Kang was 26 when he left his native country to study in France, a distant and foreign land. His expatriate experience was marked by his confrontation with the Other: his culture, his outlook, his judgment. This encounter with the unknown and otherness became his primary source of inspiration, and art became an outlet for his anxiety. Kun Kang’s works question the evolution of personality, the perception of others and of the self, and the relationships that bind individuals to one another. Taking the form of drawings, paintings or sculptures, they convey the feelings of confusion and contradiction so familiar to the artist.

Born in South Korea in 1988, Kun Kang is a graduate of the Ecole européenne supérieure d’art de Bretagne-Rennes, and the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris-Cergy. Following his studies, he pursued his artistic career, participating in solo and group exhibitions and residency programs in his native Korea, as well as in France and Italy.