Gallery Chang in Midtown Manhattan (Gallery Chang, NYC) presents the solo exhibition REALITY + IMAGE: Revisiting the Works of the 2010s by hyperrealist painter Kim Kang Yong, on view from September 30 to October 22.
This exhibition introduces the works Kim Kang Yong most rigorously experimented with and developed during his stay in New York in the 2010s, when he redefined the possibilities of painting through his unique visual language known as “sand painting.” In particular, the paintings that explore the ambiguous gap between materiality and image continue to feel vivid and sensorial even in today’s New York.
Using sand as if it were a brush, this artist, both unfamiliar and profound in vision, has drawn an independent trajectory within Korean contemporary art. From a distance, his works resemble photographs; up close, the surface grains begin to speak. Within them are bricks and sand—scenes where temporality and narrative, Korean material sensibility and international formal language, merge on a single plane. The tension in Kim’s paintings arises precisely at that boundary. His work has been described not merely as material experimentation, but as “visual thinking” that challenges the grammar of art history.
Born in Jeongeup, North Jeolla Province in 1950, Kim Kang Yong studied Western painting at Hongik University in the 1970s under the master of Dansaekhwa, Park Seo-bo (1931–2023). After earning his MFA from Hongik University Graduate School, he served as a professor there. In 2004, he left academia and worked as a full-time artist in New York for ten years. He has held solo exhibitions at venues including Park Ryu Sook Gallery, Gana Art Center, Seoul Arts Center, Sungkok Art Museum, and the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. His works are in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art; Sungkok Art Museum; Hongik University Museum of Art; Park Soo Keun Museum; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Korea; Incheon District Prosecutors’ Office; and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation (LA), among others.
This exhibition marks the fifth collaboration between Gallery Chang and Kim Kang Yong. Curator Jinnie Kang commented, “I believe the works from this period represent the artistic peak of Kim Kang Yong. Presenting them again in New York today feels not like a simple retrospective, but like a response that reactivates the accumulated time and energy within them. I hope this exhibition becomes a point of reconnection between Korean visual language and the world. I am delighted to introduce the trajectory of Kim Kang Yong to more audiences in New York.”
https://www.nyculturebeat.com/index.php?mid=Art2&document_srl=4165362