and & and, (blank) comma
Kang Jiyun discusses bodily sensations and incomplete personal experiences through the mediums of writing, video, and installation. Previously, her practice had dealt with the relationship between the self, the other, and the communal, but since 2018, Kang shifted her attention to investigating what the opposite of completeness could be. Recently, she has made videos and installations that provide viewers with incomplete experiences in the realm of “seeing,” aiming to focus on the senses between connectedness and disconnect through her works.
In the 2022 solo exhibition and & and, (blank) comma, Kang turns her attention to “between” itself or the things that might exist in the betweens of things. This gaze is a question about “How do we not see things?” and a plea to us to look into spaces where there is nothing to focus on.
Depth and Blank presents a two-channel video featuring two worlds that are equal yet nonidentical, simultaneous yet not observable together, but are ultimately found to be a single, linked world. The video is projected onto two screens distanced differently from the viewer, and the two channels of the video constantly merge as one and break into two, confounding and preventing the viewer from making a clear focus. Instead of focusing on either of the two videos, the viewer must busily move back and forth between them and see them blurrily, and at last, he can see the two worlds presented by the video together and as one.
Pillar, a series of casts made from the space between two persons’ bodies, is a continuation of Floatings (2021) presented in Kang’s 2021 solo exhibition After Image. The series presents portions usually thrown away when taking molds of people’s bodies and materializes the non-visible shape cast by standing human bodies. The sculptures transition between representationalism and abstraction depending on the viewing angle and question how we observe things from a fixed angle and the habitual anteriority thereby ingrained in the way we see things. In Distance Dance, Kang deletes the space between the performers, which paradoxically accentuates the between-center-middle more than ever. The work features the video recording of a swing dance performance staged in the fashion of social distancing using resistance bands and exercise bars. In the video, Kang deletes the distance created by the instrumentation of the band and bar. However, Kang places the two monitors playing the video recording at a distance and makes viewers acutely imagine the issues of linkage, contact, and balance existing between the two worlds disconnected by the two monitors.
The three works mentioned so far require the viewer to approach the presented images (and the spaces the images manifest in) through the attitude of a practitioner, “as if making basting stitches or backstitches with one’s eyes.” But, in Ambiguous Silhouette Preciseness, the viewer must move his body, adjust the distance between the work and himself, and proactively search for the meaning of the object in front of him. The definitions “obvious, precise, vivid” expressed in the work contradict the viewer’s self-identity and lead his every attempt at seeing to predestined failures. However, Kang takes this state of failure as the opportunity to recall within the viewer the intimate senses prompted by the in-betweens of uncertain things.
Living through the COVID-19 era, we have witnessed “things we have never once doubted before collapsing in one moment,” and we are yet to find what is the right distance between things, meaning that “we must practice recognizing things that are beyond (or before) what we could focus on and work at imagining the ways we could link dissimilar worlds,” Kang says. In other words, and & and, (blank) comma is the story of reconciling the numerous disconnects and confrontations around us one step at a time, a discussion on how we could fill the various gaps in our everyday lives.