Naeun Kang is interested in exploring human conditions: irrationality, fluctuating hormones, social constructs, and interpersonal relations, fluctuating mood, the coexistence of humor and despair.
Her subject varies from daily conundrums and folkloric ancient tales to imagined scenarios.many of her works have their starting point in personal memories, which are reconstructed with fragments of popular culture, mythologies, literature into visual metaphors. Through works Kang questions the way we examine our surroundings and its relations. Her most recent works delved into female inner lives and under-represented female narrative, fluctuating hormones, gender roles, grotesque bodily troubles, in hopes of contextualizing fresh grounds for discussing intersectionality and vulnerability.
Indigestion of Feelings - 2021, oil and wax on canvas, 40 x 30 x 2.5cm
When I started using meditation app as an agent of self-care during the lockdown, I found these apps discuss the sensations of the body quite a lot, rather than focusing purely on the cerebral like I expected. They have their specific way of speaking, how the feelings 'sit' on your body parts, which made me more salient of my own body, and lead me to visualize it as well.
Sun in my eyes - 2021, watercolor on paper, monotype and watercolor on paper, oil on linen, tape, 48 x 41
sun and eyelashes, and sensing the change of season
Blushmaking - 2020, Oil on polycotton canvas, 24 x 30cm .
work about the love aggression, an incongruous display of emotion, violent manifestation of expression of affection, sucking one’s flesh, leaving the marks of popped blood capilaries.
Mystic Sea(Menstrual Calendar) - 2021, oil, wax on canvas, 60 x 73 x 2.5 cm. Painting made thinking about the images of female reproductive organs, pictograms from Period cycle tracking app, and Virginia Woolfe’s waves.
Breathing - 2019, 24 x 30 cm, oil on polycotton canvas.
Paninting a solution to an already impossible narrative as a way of mitigating childhood fear, of Jonah from bible being eaten by fish.
the Dayender - 2019 ,Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 x 2cm.
Daydreaming about a mythical dayender, who decides when the day begins and ends.
Gelatinous Venus, 2020 - oil on canvas, 40x 50x 2 cm. Aphrodite is said to have arisen as a beautiful, fully grown woman from seafoam from the blood of Uranus’ castration in Greek mythology. Some versions of the myth she was born pregnant with her two sons which she gave as she emerged. The mythical universe that conjures her up from a seafoam doesn’t free her from the uninventive concept of childbearing and childbirth. Painted here is a scene that was historically overlooked by painters, where the goddess is still in a gelatinous state, free of the burdens of being subject to the male gaze, objectification, responsibility of motherhood.
Detachable Arms for Spooning - 2019 oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm. When you are spooning, the arm pinned underneath gets uncomfortable after a few minutes. This painting came from imagining arms being detachable like that of dolls, as a fictional solution to mitigate this kind of private inconvenience.
Curiosity - 2018 oil on paper mounted on birch panel, 30cm x 40cm
about hairyness and curiosity of puberty, part of graduation project in 2018 about impermanence and non-dramatic actions.
After Image, - 2018 oil on wood, 25cm x 18cm and watercolor on wall. Image painted ghostly on the wall imitates fuzzy after image, a retinal impression which persists even after shift of the gaze. These works were a part of my graduation project about subtle and non-dramatic interactions and influences.
