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Lotus Kang, Park Chan-kyong solo shows open at Kukje Gallery

Published: 19 Mar. 2026, 17:14 Updated: 02 Apr. 2026, 10:30

LEE JIAN
[email protected]

″Chora Chora″ (2025-2026) by Lotus Kang is on display at the artist's solo show held at the Kukje Gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul, on March 19. [YONHAP]

Kukje Gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul, opened solo exhibitions by Canadian artist Lotus Kang and local filmmaker Park Chan-kyong on Thursday, each exploring, through their respective practices, questions of temporality, identity and transformation with distinctive East Asian elements.

Kang’s exhibition, titled “Chora,” marks her first solo presentation in her motherland. The 41-year-old artist was born in Toronto to Korean parents and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and participated in the Whitney Biennial in the same year. Kang was recently selected by Bvlgari as the inaugural artist for its pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale at the upcoming Venice Biennale.

Working across sculpture, photography and installation, Kang explores themes of impermanence, inheritance, memory and time.

The exhibition title “Chora” derives from philosopher Julia Kristeva’s concept of chora, which is a fluid, pre-linguistic space of becoming that exists prior to fixed meaning, structure or identity.

At Kukje, Kang engages the gallery’s hanok (traditional Korean house) structure, particularly the courtyard, or madang, as a central site. The exhibition opens with “Chora II” (2025-26), a sculpture of a lone crying baby bird with its empty mouth pointed skyward, perched atop an enlarged lotus form, installed in the madang. The work is positioned to be viewed only from inside the building, through the windows, creating a deliberate spatial tension between interior and exterior, per the artist.

“So we’re in a traditional Korean home, and my interest is in thinking through the layers of history and time that exist in personal bodies, but also social, national and planetary bodies,” Kang told reporters at the gallery on Thursday. “Making work for a hanok is not about replicating tradition, but what I call ‘regurgitating’ — a translation that can never be the same, that entails loss but also something else.”

“The viewer is inherently positioned both inside the hanok and outside the courtyard,” she continued, “occupying a fluid relationship between inside and outside. That in-between space reflects a condition I inhabit — moving among cultures res and contexts — and extends my interest in creating spaces that embody that state.”

Kang further extends this spatial logic by recreating the madang indoors in the installation “Chora Chora,” presented for the first time in her Seoul exhibition. Constructed at the same scale as Kukje Gallery’s actual courtyard, the structure is built with steel joists and draped in translucent fabric. Installed atop a mirrored floor, the work generates a sense of infinitely expanding space. In doing so, it unsettles notions of structural stability while also revealing the artist’s own approach to understanding identity - as something fluid, unstable and continuously refracted, the gallery noted.

Kang’s other works on view include her aluminum anchovies and lotus roots from “Tract XXIX” (2025) and lumingrams from her “Synapse” series produced in 2025.

Park Chan-kyong speaks to reporters about his solo show being held at the Kukje Gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul, on March 19. [YONHAP]

Meanwhile, Park Chan-kyong presents his solo exhibition “Zen Master Eyeball” at Kukje Gallery. Best known as a filmmaker, Park has also worked across installation, though this exhibition marks a return to painting, his original training. He received his BFA in painting from Seoul National University and an MFA in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts.

“Although I majored in Western painting, I didn’t paint much after entering university,” Park said. “Returning to painting after such a long pause, I realized that for me, painting is both a hometown and a point of origin.”

Park presents 24 paintings inspired by temple murals and Joseon-era (1392-1910) folk painting, reinterpreted through elements of the grotesque, the sublime, fantasy and humor.

The headlining work which the show’s name is titled after is inspired by the Zen Buddhist anecdote about a Tang Dynasty (618-907) monk known as Juzhi, who answered every question by raising a single finger. When a young attendant began imitating him without understanding, the monk cut off the boy’s finger. When the boy fled in shock, the monk called him back and raised his finger once more, at which moment the boy is said to have attained enlightenment.

″Zen Master Eye″ (2025) by Park Chan-kyong is on display at his solo show being held at the Kukje Gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul, on March 19. [YONHAP]

Park reimagines this story with a visceral twist, replacing the finger with an eyeball being plucked out. “The young monk is myself,” he said. “As a visual artist constantly imitating something, I felt like I should pluck out my eye. I painted it so that the eyeball in the hand appears to be looking back at me.”

He describes the body of work as “Zen Buddhist grotesque science fiction,” adding that “Korean culture once held a great deal of humor and satire, but at some point, it feels like we forgot and lost it.”

“Chora” and “ “Zen Master Eyeball” runs through May 10.

BY LEE JIAN [[email protected]]