Leekyung Kang, Invented Landscapes

Leekyung Kang, Invented Landscapes at the West Las Vegas Library Gallery

by D.K. Sole

Coming into the gallery, you see two gleaming aluminum works on the wall to your left, flat prints straight ahead (later you find out they’re etchings and woodcuts), a row of square paintings on the wall to the right, and, in the center of the room, a pedestal supporting a panel that opens out into triangular flanges, like the top of the egg in Alien. There’s a panel of short text by the artist, explaining that “The goal of this work is to expose unseen and hidden spaces by capturing the raw and unfinished state of our present environment,” an aim that is expressed succinctly by one of the aluminum pieces, Lamination of Reality (2018), in which a row of vertical plank-like shapes is tilting under the apparent weight of a horizontal form that looks, at the top, like a row of leaping hills. There’s a similar moment in one of her online videos, Irreversible Space (2017), when the camera drops below the surface of a desert into an infinite under-environment that will feel familiar to anyone who has ever fallen through the world in a MMORPG.

Leekyung Kang, Lamentation of Reality, Mixed media on mirrored aluminum, 2018 — Leekyung Kang, Lamentation of Reality, Mixed media on mirrored aluminum, 2018

Architecture and landscape, in Leekyung Kang’s work, become systems of layered forms that try to create restrictions (cubes, grids, and rectangles) or flow and wriggle away (fades or scribbles trespassing through the hard boundaries). You see the dynamic play out in different ways as she switches from one medium to another. In the mirrored aluminum, your human reflection swims like a ghost through the geometries of the surface picture. In the mixed media screenprint-paintings, worms of spray fly across the borders of the painted rectangles and a multicolored sphere bulges between two columnal stripes as if her abstract box is imprisoning a rebellious planet. These paintings don’t rebel against the edges of their own canvases, though, and this plus their regular, square, modest size works against the notion of things evading their architecture. Her ideas probably have more impact when you see them in one of her installations, where (judging from the pictures on her website) irregular ziggurats of imagery are free to crawl up the walls.

The prints are more self-contained, better able to work on their own. They separate themselves from the layered mode of the paintings by switching focus from a structure that has already been semi-fixed together, to an environment of parts that either stand separately or else slot together in formations that emphasize their own impermanence. (“I could be different,” murmurs each triangle in Underland (2020)) The subterranean battle of blurs and angles and spheres becomes the calm space of a rebus. The glaring pink squares in the double-panelled etching, Invented Landscape (2020), refine the fades of pinks and greens down to a single lightning flash. A neon tube flicks on.

After I'd seen the exhibition, I emailed the artist and asked if she wouldn't mind answering some questions. Very kindly, she agreed.

DKS: Looking at your website, I see you’ve made sculptures, videos, and wall installations, as well as the prints and paintings you’re showing us in Las Vegas. Could you tell us more about these other works?

LK: I usually start my works on digital platforms like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I draw drafts and idea sketches. Since you can't specify the materiality of imagery in digital space, this process provokes me to articulate the ideas of medium/materiality when I bring the work out of my computer monitor. So, the cubes, pile of sand, and some rocks are represented as familiar textures that we can easily imagine, but the shape and form of each element are different, due to the processes that they went through as I created them. I am interested in the question; what do things look like once I take them out of the computer monitor? Would it be possible for me to make them tangible? If so, what would they be?

DKS: In your artist statement you say, “My work has focused on exploring both exterior surfaces and interior infrastructure of the cities I have lived in.” You’ve been interested in the idea of architectural infrastructure since at least 2013. How did you decide to focus on that subject? What keeps you interested in it?

LK: I am from Seoul, South Korea, which is one of the largest metropolises in the world. I grew up in the middle of the city, where there are a lot of construction sites. The life of the whole city is an ongoing process of contraction and de-construction/re-construction. The facade of under-construction scenes with scaffolding and cranes, mechanical processes that create geometric aesthetics with their presences, fascinated me. I was curious about the endless circulation of the construction that produces historical transitions of the architecture, physical transformation, and remnants which remain there without being fully revealed. So, I thought what if I could excavate the layers of history as the basis for a printmaking practice, and it has been the main idea in my work until now.

DKS: Following on from that, could you talk about the way you make your experience of space so abstract? When you refer to “the cities I’ve lived in” it initially sounds as if you’re going to address specific cities in a way that the rest of us would recognize (showing us the silhouettes of landmark buildings, for example) but most of the work doesn’t look that way at all.

LK: I have visited several cities (New York, Minneapolis, Providence, Boston, Doha, etc) since I left Seoul in 2014 to travel to the US and the Middle East, and I was more interested in a city's life, the nature of construction works or the transformation of infrastructure, than working in specific places. (Well, I was interested in the New England area in terms of its architectural history and the study of vernacular structures when I was at RISD, Providence, RI, due to a collaboration with an architect friend.) My work began to address the virtual structures of cities when I discovered Google Earth. Through the exploration of digitized surfaces, my perception of reality has been altered. When navigating the digital world, I often wonder what actually lies beneath the web cursor. The seamless surface does not reveal the infrastructure of the hidden space, nor can one see the materiality and responses of data components in “real time.” As one continues to explore this vacuum, these imaginings go beyond the surface, hidden in a layered matrix made up of spider webs of endless history, time, space, and transition. Computer projections contain layered evidence of the randomness of our Internet presence. In my work, I attempt to excavate each layer and explore the unseen space by rearranging components through digital language manipulation and photo editing.

DKS: Did the feeling of “exploring both exterior surfaces and interior infrastructure” change when you moved from Korea to the United States? Do the different kinds of city give you different experiences to explore?

LK: It is more closely related to my digital practices. Well, I was trained as a painter in my undergrad, and I usually used oil painting very intuitively to focus on the relationship between the canvas and myself. However, once I learned about printmaking (screenprinting) in grad school, I discovered that the process couldn’t be just based on my intuition, as painting was, since the plan needed to be laid out ahead of time due to the procedure, which included the preparation of digital files. So, the use of photographs and manipulation of photos through screen-printing and other printmaking processes made my idea of art completely different. My digital work is inspired by my traditional printmaking practice. Similar to printmaking, each image is layered on top of a substrate. The infinite layers of digital matrix resemble the stone used in lithography that reveals a complex layered history. In order to redefine “reality”, I invite the viewer to explore the imaginative space, the delamination of reality in the in-between world of dimensions (as I mentioned above, I easily traverse between exterior surface and interior infrastructure).

DKS: You talk about real (city) space and also digital space. Could you tell us more about the way you connect those two things? I like the way your awareness of ‘glitches” or mysterious missing space turns up in both your real-world works and your digital videos (for example: the mirrored aluminum piece and the moment when the pixels disappear and come back in your online video Temporal Dimensions at about 1:30).

LK: The first time that I found glitches was by random chance when I was navigating the city that I lived in via Google Earth. Due to insufficient information, the glitches happened whenever I moved my cursor down and the universe came up all of a sudden when I went beyond the ground level. It made me think, “What is underneath me?” and “Below my feet is the unseen space that the histories of the world have accumulated over time.” The reason I often use mirrors in my installation and video work is to project the reflection of reality, as well as distortions of reality that I can't see when I’m working in real time. The use of mirrors helps me broaden my visions of reality. It’s as if it reflects the unseen space that I have been trying to define through my work.

Virtual experience in the digital world has transformed our perception of reality. The recognition of the physicality of space has been distorted. By leveraging the tension between digital image and traditional mediums, I am able to intensify this distortion through mass image duplication, which results in an uncanny aesthetic. As a consequence of this experiment, one can find a co-existence of two- and three-dimensional worlds through disorientation, randomness, and repetition in this complex grid. It is through this digital reproduction system that I would like to share my perception of the world with my viewer.

DKS: When I visited your exhibition, the person who was with me said that the designs and colors in your paintings (especially the bright greens and pinks) reminded him of graphic design from the 1980s. To soothe his curiosity, can I ask you to tell us more about your distinctive color palette? I’m wondering if these artificial colors are a way of expressing the weirdness of the “unseen space” you mention.

LK: The color schemes in my work come from the glitches and LED lights that I usually use for my installations. I get inspiration from my simple digital drawings (some doodling or photo manipulations) and even from some failures/mistakes that I make accidentally. Sometimes, those failures look like old video game scenes or analog TV images due to the pixelated images or jagged edges, which I enjoy. So, the work might have some color schemes in common with ‘80s aesthetics because of that.

DKS: You’ve exhibited mainly on the East Coast of the U.S., in the Middle East, and in Asia. How did you come to exhibit in Las Vegas?

I lived in Doha, Qatar for about a year during my artist-in-residence program in 2017-2018. Doha has grown in the middle of the desert over a short period of time, and the historical background and the formation of the city were very interesting to me. In regards to the background and history of Las Vegas, I have wanted to explore Vegas as part of my artistic ongoing research into the formation of the city and the desert. I am drawn to the unrealistic environment in Las Vegas, so it would be great if I could come back here for an artist residency, or any other opportunities for engaging in art events or community.

Leekyung Kang, Ecstasy of the Surface, Folded etching, bookbinding, 2019 — Leekyung Kang, Ecstasy of the Surface, Folded etching, bookbinding, 2019

Leekyung Kang, Invented Landscapes is on view at the West Las Vegas Library Gallery through October 25, 2020

All images courtesy the artist and the West Las Vegas Library Gallery.

Australian artist D.K. Sole lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is in charge of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.

Published on October 16, 2020