“One might imagine the image of a storm, but daily life is, unexpectedly, as quiet as a shoreline where small ripples gently lap, as if nothing were happening at all. In such a place, photographs become wet, are occasionally swept away by waves, and the artist casts nets and wraps sheets of plastic in an attempt to lose as little as possible. While waiting for water, wind, and sunlight to do their work, hoping that something might be caught, he remains a photographer—just as he always has been.

PEOL (Masiran-ro 370, 2025) invites viewers into such a time and space. Photographs made by the sea dry slowly under sunlight streaming through large glass windows, becoming stiff and tacky like dried fish. The quiet beach—where a taxi will come if called, but where it is difficult to encounter another person—creates the sense that the location could have been anywhere. It did not have to be there. Rather, because it is an empty site encountered by chance, unadorned by necessity, it offers a strange satisfaction in which everything feels temporarily in its place. Like the brief silence taken to inhale while singing, or the sound of wind passing by.

It may be my bad habit to be more interested in what is absent than what is visible. Yet it is difficult to deny that Kang Jiwoong’s photographs have, as much as they have filled exhibition spaces, also emptied them—more precisely, that they have staged the passage of time as it empties itself. Like an hourglass, accumulating and releasing grains of time, flipping over, and beginning again, they reveal a certain landscape of the present within that motion. Perhaps we cannot escape this cycle. Even so, the photographer waits for moments when the direction of the wind seems about to change—moments when that, alone, might be enough.”

— from “The Afterlife, or the Living Life, of Photography” by Wonhwa Yoon