A night be gone : Kam Minkyung
Artist’s Note
My work is an attempt to examine how I, as a subject, am seen and shaped by society and by my time. I approach questions of how we have existed and what kind of era we live in by tracing traces such as handwritten documents like letters, books, and photographs. Recent residency experiences have helped me expand this perspective further.
My 2017 work 《A memory without a roof》 refers to found materials or objects whose origins are unclear and whose forms are incomplete. Our memories and perceptions are likely fragmented in the same way. Continuing from this idea, my 2018 to 2019 work 《A night be gone》 addresses the gap between what we remember and what we perceive.
The world is an image. The moment we face an image, we confront a kind of history. That history is made of small, personal movements. Within it, I find an image of our time in which we cannot help but remain passive. As social beings, our systems of thought, knowledge, religion, and belief can be overturned by images. Although it is the individual who sees, it is impossible for the being to see in a fully independent way. Within the complex system of seeing and being seen, our judgements cannot escape constant anachronism. For this reason, vision, for me as someone who interprets and reproduces images, is like blindness.
Through representation, I have come to realise that facts cannot be fixed, and that meaning is something that endlessly slips away. What appears visually through fragments of painting is only a visible surface. What can never be contained may exist instead as absence.
Kam Minkyung
(Translated by Gallery Chosun)