Seoul Museum of Art, Seosomun Main Building, on view through March 19
The first retrospective of Kang Seok-ho, who passed away in an unexpected accident
The Seoul Museum of Art (Director Baek Ji-sook) presents <Kang Seok-ho: 3 Minutes of Happiness> through March 19 in the third-floor galleries and the Crystal Gallery of the Seosomun Main Building.
By organizing an exhibition that brings together the chronological world of paintings by Kang Seok-ho (1971–2021), who died in an unexpected accident in 2021, along with his design collection, the museum illuminates the artist's world in its entirety. Through this, it seeks to convey to the public Kang Seok-ho's artistic attitude, which pursued the integrated beauty of everyday life and art, and furthermore to lay the groundwork for research on the artist.
Within the exhibition title, ‘ 3 Minutes of Happiness’ is the title of an essay by the artist Kang Seok-ho, and it serves as a metaphor for the pleasurable sense afforded by the everyday beauty discovered over the course of a day's journey passing through home, studio, and walking path. For the artist, the span of three minutes signifies a fleeting moment of light-hearted freedom attained when one is not submerged in the weight of reality but instead maintains a contemplative distance.
The exhibition unfolds sequentially across a total of four chapters based on the flow of the essays written by the artist. The title of each chapter is likewise drawn from the artist's essays.
△Chapter 1 presents five painting series—Clothing, Gesture, Couple, Nude, and Rubik's Cube—indexed in that order. Through scenes edited into new compositions by the artist's gaze, one can glimpse the freedom and sense of balance that he pursued. △Chapter 2 is a room reconstructed from the design furniture and objects the artist collected, along with furniture he made himself. His collecting, which reflects his own artistic sensibility and taste, embodies his formal thinking.
△Chapter 3 is created as a walking path where visitors can savor the artist's world of painting as if floating through it. Following the aimless everyday walks that the artist undertook, visitors can freely appreciate the paintings from all of the series. △Chapter 4, as part of the exhibition's related programs, presents a sound installation that reconstructs interviews with 25 people who remember the artist across three channels.
This exhibition, the first retrospective following the artist's death, illuminates the world of Kang Seok-ho, who explored painting while building an artistic world that encompassed both the two-dimensional and the sculptural through his design collection. It is a special opportunity not only to see Kang Seok-ho's original character as both painter and collector, but also to experience in one place the aesthetic sensibility, emotion, and taste of an artist that run through work and hobby, everyday life and art.
This exhibition is structured along two directions: on the one hand, it conveys art-historical significance through a configuration that indexes the major works of his chronological painting series, and on the other, it guides visitors to newly discover meaning by responding to the artist's imagery as they appreciate the paintings as if wandering along a walking path. Beyond serving as a comprehensive compendium of information on Kang Seok-ho's world of painting, the exhibition hopes to become a mediating space that resonates with visitors and shares experience and sensation, as a starting point for research on the artist.
▲ Untitled
▲ ‘Untitled’ from the exhibition <Kang Seok-ho: 3 Minutes of Happiness>
▲ The living room of the Myeongnyun-dong home where Kang Seok-ho lived in 2020
▲ A cabinet made by Kang Seok-ho himself and his collected items