Kang Seok Ho

Early life and Background

Kang Seok Ho was born in 1971 in South Korea and studied sculpture at Seoul National University, a training that sharpened his sensitivity to volume and three-dimensional form even as he went on to work primarily in painting. He continued his studies in Germany at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Dutch conceptual artist Jan Dibbets, completing an MFA in painting in 2001 and immersing himself in European art history and design.

After winning the UBS Art Award in Basel in 2000, Kang returned to Seoul, where he developed a close network with contemporaries such as Park Chan-kyong, Haegue Yang, Chung Seoyoung, and Kim Beom while choosing to focus on painting at a time when Korean art discourse emphasised multimedia and conceptual practices. He later taught at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, and his daily life—spanning reading, music, hiking, fishing, and collecting design furniture—fed into a practice that refused to separate art from lived experience.

Kang Seok Ho Artworks

Kang Seok Ho’s artworks explore how looking, distance, and surface structure the relationship between an image and its painted translation, often using photographs as starting points that he cropped, enlarged, and re-angled on canvas. Working within figurative conventions while minimising narrative, he used thin layers of oil paint, built up through tapping and repeated touches of the brush, to create luminous, almost transparent fields where light and air seem to circulate freely.

Clothes and early series

Beginning around 1999, Kang’s Clothes series focused on cropped views of garments that subtly reveal the curves and posture of the body beneath, such as the backside of a figure in a green check jacket with hands clasped behind. By isolating elements like pattern, wrinkles, and colour, he transformed everyday clothing into quasi-landscapes, emphasising rhythm and texture over portrait identity or narrative.

Kang’s interest in the mediation of vision extended into series based on media images, where he edited out recognisable features to focus on posture, folds, and tonal transitions rather than story. This approach underscored his commitment to widening the gap between source image and painting, turning each canvas into a site of patient optical and material inquiry.

Gesture, Get Up, and the body as landscape

In the Gesture series, Kang painted black-and-white images of politicians and athletes captured mid-performance, concentrating on the expressive charge of hands, torsos, and stances under media scrutiny. His Get Up works zoomed in on clothed torsos and buttocks, excluding faces and other markers to focus on how fabric creases and stretches over the human figure.

These investigations evolved into the Nude series, in which Kang magnified patches of skin—décolletage, navels, buttocks—so closely that the body becomes an abstract terrain of folds, shadows, and tonal variation. Informed by East Asian landscape painting, he treated even the human figure as a kind of landscape, a mutable ground for exploring gesture, depth, and surface in paint rather than conventional erotic or narrative themes.

Cubes, still lifes, and everyday things

Alongside his figure-based series, Kang developed still lifes and the Cube paintings, which examine how light and shadow articulate simple volumetric forms. These works extend his interest in the boundary between flatness and three-dimensionality, often rendering ordinary objects with a lyric transparency that emphasises atmosphere as much as form.

Kang’s deep interest in modern design and the Bauhaus movement—reflected in his collecting and making of furniture such as chairs and shelves—parallels his painting’s balance of practicality and poetry, seeing beauty in the edited fragments of everyday life. Exhibitions that juxtaposed his design objects and paintings have highlighted how his sensibility crossed between fine art, interiors, and the textures of domestic space.

Select Awards and Accolades

• UBS Art Award, Basel, Switzerland (2000)
• Seoknam Art Prize, Seoul (2004)
• Selected artist, Young Korean Artists 2008: I AM AN ARTIST, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2008)
• Professor, Seoul National University of Science and Technology (2018–2021)

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Kang Seok Ho Exhibitions

Kang Seok Ho has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at major institutions and galleries in South Korea and internationally, with posthumous shows consolidating his reputation as a key figure in contemporary painting. To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Kang Seok Ho follow him on Ocula; you can also view his exhibitions on Ocula.

Select solo exhibitions

• seok ho kang: Three Minute Delight, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022–2023 (first retrospective)
• Deep Is the Rising Sun, Far Is the Falling One, Tina Kim Gallery, New York, 2023
• Hold Still, Tina Kim Gallery, New York, c. 2024–2025 (Nude and Couple series)
• Sixteen solo exhibitions across venues including Insa Art Space, Kumho Museum of Art, and Mimesis Art Museum, 2003–2020

Select group exhibitions

• Young Korean Artists 2008: I AM AN ARTIST, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
• Kabinett sector presentations at Art Basel with Tina Kim Gallery, featuring focused selections of his paintings
• Multiple group presentations at Tina Kim Gallery, New York, and Gallery SoSo, South Korea

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Ocula | 2025