Gallery Chang in Midtown Manhattan presents the four-artist exhibition The Mark of Time from January 8 to February 17, 2026. Bringing together works by Korean and American artists Cho Yong Ik, Kim Kang Yong, Ed Moses, and Jimi Gleason, the exhibition examines the origins of Eastern and Western abstraction through the shared lens of time as a mode of thought.
The Mark of Time does not approach abstraction as a singular style or a linear outcome of art history. Instead, it considers abstraction as a way of thinking that emerged simultaneously across different cultural contexts. The exhibition traces how artists working within distinct environments and traditions have shared fundamental questions of time, material, and action. Here, abstraction is understood not as a finished form, but as a process through which experience accumulates and is recorded. What appears on the canvas is less a completed image than the residue of time—repeated gestures, countless decisions, and moments of choice and withdrawal layered over duration.
The exhibition is structured around two interconnected dialogues.
The first dialogue brings together the works of Ed Moses and Cho Yong Ik, viewing abstraction as a trace of time. For Moses, painting is not a means of representation but an event shaped by action and decision. His canvases bear not only visible brushstrokes, but also erased movements, hesitation, and the temporal span of the painting’s making. Cho Yong-Ik’s work is likewise formed through repetition, restraint, and a meditative rigor. Rather than completing an image in a single gesture, he gradually builds density through sustained and deliberate actions, allowing abstraction to function as a vessel for the experience of time.
The second dialogue connects the practices of Kim Kang Yong and Jimi Gleason, expanding abstraction into a materially constructed world. Kim’s brick paintings are the result of labor, weight, and time meticulously layered onto the canvas. While they evoke physical structures, they operate less as representations than as painterly inquiries into material, structure, and illusion. Gleason similarly constructs his surfaces through repetitive gestures and layered silvery pigments, allowing resistance, reflection, and material tension to shape form.
Curator Jinnie Kang explains, “Rather than deeply comparing or opposing East and West, The Mark of Time seeks to show how different modes of abstract thinking, formed within distinct contexts, can converge into a single flow. By viewing abstraction not through cultural divisions but through attitudes toward time, action, and material, the exhibition highlights moments where the artists’ works intersect and resonate naturally within parallel relationships.”
https://www.nyculturebeat.com/index.php?document_srl=4174429&mid=Lounge2