Exhibition Information

A Stretching Cat
2021 (출처= 플레이스막1) 72.7×100cm

Buddies in a Pine Forest
2021 (출처= 플레이스막1) 50×60.6cm

A Wise Cat
2021 (출처= 플레이스막1) 53×40.9cm

Stray Cats
2020 (출처= 플레이스막1) 24.2×33.4cm

			<When You Drop Anchor on the Island>

 

 From the cosmic perspective, we always live in the moment until we die. When we view the whole hours of our life as only one moment, we may regard it as insignificant but, at the same time, feel its pricelessness. For this reason, I have been interested in recording the memorable scenes of my life in the form of paintings. Expressing in paintings a variety of relations and emotions I experience in my life, I have reaffirmed my will toward the world and understood life as something meaningful.

 The works on display at this exhibition deal with a series of events that happened when I was gradually able to draw again after recovering from the situation of having unexpectedly lied on a sickbed. Spending long hours in isolation on bed at my house, I could again take a walk outdoors when I came across some alley cats in a park that I had always passed by. Those cats – having an ambiguous status of neither wild nor domestic animals – had led a not-so-easy life living with humans in a long history. I have witnessed the life of those alley cats who dry their body with soft sunlight in a warm spring day or shiver in a cold winter rain but mostly live no more than two years. I could not but have a strong impression of their life mixed with joy and suffering. But they showed me the force of life in which I found great solace. Soon afterwards, I admitted Dusik, an alley cat who lost its mother, as a family. Its strong will for survival by overcoming birth defects taught me much courage once again. Thus, the works on display not only feature my encounters with alley cats that had been driven to a life of despair but also my lasting friendship with Dusik. 

 This exhibition is titled “When You Drop Anchor on the Island” partly because it deals with the story of those alley cats that have cast anchor at my heart that had long been alienated and partly because it is the story of all existences who are anchored to the world temporarily before they return to their origin. I believe that I can tell the story of universal life just through a precise portrayal of someone’s daily life. I wish that my paintings based on my strong love of life would be a little comfort to those who feel that life is too heavy to live and hard to endure.

 

Kang Jeong hyeon