Hyun Wook KANG, Dangrim Art Museum
Birth
1973, Daejeon
Genre
Installation, Photography, Media
Homepage
Hyun Wook, KANG_curated by Eung Moon PARK
Having studied at Le Fresnoy in France, Kang Hyun-wook began making artwork based on his experience as a foreign student. These works highlighted cultural differences. After using an online automatic translator to translate written ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ into each country’s mother tongue languages, he exposed an indiscernible mess of the translated text, which displayed the lethargic state of our society as well as the frustration of Utopia. In the video work As a Habit (2005) , Hyun-wook made a performance video about a song of chanson being sung a half beat late, illustrating a difficult time he faced as a foreigner unaccustomed to a different culture when he was studying abroad. Based on his car accident, Good Man (2009) represents how one can face an unbeatable power like death, such as a sense of crisis, anxiety and confusion; by expressing and reproducing the collision of the accident as well as its debris from the car crash through the use of a hologram in a slow motion, it conveys feelings of romance and softness. In Great Fear (2009) , Hyun-wook expressed the anxiety and fear lurking in city life. Also Sick Murphy (2011) , which is a small robot puppy that has Alzheimer disease, seems to represent the lethargic feeling and depression of humans in a high technology society. While mainly working in Europe, Hyun-wook’s work deals with the issue of communication in modern society and social ailments, such as cultural differences and racism, human disasters, and the conflict between humans and science. Hyun-wook uses a variety of mediums and genres such as hologram, installations, mixed media, and drawings to express such issues humorously and cheerfully. In this exhibition, he presents his works from as early as 2004, to the recent works such as Suicide, Run Like Hell and What Do You Think About America?
