A walk through Mind – Trace, 2021
What is the real motivation behind the paintings of A Walk through Mind series? Kang Un directions this question at himself. The reflective process of marking the traces of unstable, unruly pasts of the self involves encounters with things left unspoken, memories better left untouched. In Kang’s practice, this stroll through the time is materialized into visible forms through the ritualistic act of inscribing and writing reflections on the past only to erase and deconstruct them. In this regard, the two palimpsestic paintings shown for the first time at the exhibition are walks through the artist’s as well as Gwangju’s ‘mind.’ The two paintings face each other in dialogue: while the painting on one side is an elegy to the fallen victims of the uprising, represented through the inscription and effacement of the then censored poem by Kim Juntae; the other marks the moment when a personal story becomes history and that history into a song. The layered map of Gwangju traces their footsteps.