Minsook Kang (KR) is an artist living and working in between Seoul and the Netherlands. She studied sculpture and Media Art in Seoul. She has shown her work in numerous installation and video exhibitions including Space CAN, Seoul International New Media Festival (NeMaf), Insa Art Space, Gyeonggi Creation Center (GCC) and Museum of Art at Seoul National University (MOA).
Since moving to the Netherlands in 2016, she has engaged in daily actions, storytelling performances, and publications based on her long-term research. By instigating simple gestures, she attempts to reveal structures that might underpin and undermine the everyday reality of experience as a way of reclaiming agency within the folds of the social order. Her work has been exhibited amongst others at Stroom, Research Center for Material Culture (RCMC), Quartair, Hospitalfield Arts and Zaal 3.
Artist Statement
Over the past years, my practice has taken the shape of performative interventions that have gradually expanded into public spaces. With these interventions, I aim to question the economic validation of the social spheres in which we live our lives. I’m interested in redirecting our attentions towards specific spaces that are unknown, abandoned, fragile, hidden, unseen, invisible, missing, forgotten, neglected and/or unloved. I call these “other/poetic spaces” which are situated outside of the efficiency that governs the infrastructure of capitalism.
By instigating simple gestures, I attempt to rescue, recover and reclaim the value of “other/ poetic spaces” as a way of reclaiming agency for what is usually undervalued. Through my practice, I want to reveal and shake up the power behind a story by doing micro-political gestures. What unfolds in the different projects is a critique of the capitalist structures of contemporary life and how contemporary art is inevitably a part of this structure. My performative actions can infiltrate the mundane, instilling art and its subversive potential into the cracks of soulless routines, embracing the dysfunctions and leftovers of capitalist modes of life. I believe that the whole process of my practice can also become a meaningful way to connect two domains called “art” and “life” as an artist.
HWW Plan
During the HWW residency program, she will focus on the publication and new research about Indonesian language. She is also planning to have an walking trip related to the project ” The Christmas Trees Project” in Rotterdam.