SELECTED WORKS & EXHIBITIONS

EXHIBITION

Phototaxis
Shadows Beyond the Sun

03.04.–29.05.2026
Meyer Riegger Wolff, Seoul, KR
Solo exhibition

“Across these works, Jioong Kang enters into a different relation with time. Light no longer simply produces the image at a single moment of exposure; materials remain sensitive to it, absorbing, redirecting, and slowly transforming what falls upon them. Borrowing a term from biology, this condition might be described as a form of phototaxis: a responsiveness to light that continues to shape the image long after the moment of capture, as matter registers the subtle and ongoing effects of its environment.”
- from the preface

EXHIBITION

PEOL

04.10.–30.10.2025
370, Masiran-ro, Incheon, KR

Organized by Jioong Kang
Supported by Incheon Metropolitan City and the Incheon Foundation for Arts and Culture
With assistance from Young K. Kim, Jungkyun Kim, Woochan Jung, and Sangha Khym

A solo exhibition held in a vacant space near Masiran Beach (Incheon, KR), formerly used as a tofu restaurant. I worked along Masiran Beach throughout September, followed by a month-long exhibition in October. The exhibition presented photographs that had been physically damaged in tidal flats, alongside images produced through a gum bichromate print process, exposed and printed using sunlight.

“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

EXHIBITION

The Poor

13.02.–12.04.2025
KANG Jioong, LEE Jooyeon, PARK So Yeon, Yagwang
Museumhead, Seoul, KR

Curated by HUR Hojeong
Graphic Design by A Studio A
Technical Support KIM Byungchan
Hosted and Organised by Museumhead
Supported by Arts Council Korea

“KANG Jioong contrasts the finite thickness of material with the perceived infinity of flat, reproducible images, anticipating the inevitable damage to photographs. For example, in Untitled (trace study, series) (2024), finely printed photographs are immersed in tidal flats, formalizing the intentional contamination by the tide and the ebb marks left behind as photographic surfaces. Through this series, the artist treats the printed image as a material, engaging in experiments that emphasize its physical presence. (...)

In this exhibition, the artist continues to experiment with his own home as a subject, creating a sense of distance from the familiar. He photographs a room just large enough for one person, then turns around to face the exterior of the room. Trying to capture a sense of home that has become unfamiliar, he recalls the neighboring house—identical in size but occupied by a family of six—and the rooftop where a homeless woman comes and goes. These scenes are recorded on film using only natural light, with no additional lighting. The result, right place, wrong time (2025), is a photograph of a room “floating on water.” Even with a special coating, the image absorbs moisture and gradually deforms over time. From the same series, interlude (2025) is a panoramic image taken by rotating the camera 360 degrees out the window. A fragmented view of a corner of a neighborhood—set in a densely packed residential area where buildings stand less than a meter apart—suggests overlapping fragments of everyday life.”
− from the preface by Hojeong Hur

EXHIBITION

Even hope decays…

04.05.–01.06.2024
Art Centre Art Moment, Seoul, KR
Artist Prologue 2024 selected
Solo exhibition

Director Siyoung Chu
Curator Minkyung Kim
Assistant Curator Jaehui Lee
Educator Boyeon Lee
Administration Misook Seol
Organized by Art Centre Art Moment
Supported by Youngyiel Precision Co.,Ltd.

Text Minkyung Kim
Photography Hochul Song, Dohyun Park
Graphic Design Chaehee Park
Assistant Dohyun Park, Chaeun Bae
Video Jisun Lee

“The subjects in the cloudy and fragmented photographs exist more like memories than records. Works such as Untitled (Greetings First by the Superior), Untitled (Wet Yacht Floor), and Untitled (SATOR) are displayed throughout the exhibition space, having been enlarged, fragmented, and transferred onto large fabric from the original Seomdolmoru photographs. The artist recombines the fragmented subjects through subjective and arbitrary actions, rather than contrasting them with the original. The errors that arise in this process disrupt the original. The fabric exposed to the sea then presents a more blurred and altered image through various contaminants and corrosion. In contrast, the Untitled (Skid) series, neatly exhibited in pure white frames, is a byproduct of the process of printing the fragmented images of Seomdolmoru. Although the errors in the images, formed by misalignment or machine defects, are printed on flawless paper, they possess an image that has been lost in itself. The artist erases the indicators of the subject’s existence through arbitrary combinations, partial loss and errors, misaligned appearances, and altered surfaces. This resembles fragmented memories more than transparent facts, much like the existential state of Seomdolmoru.

The artist amplifies the ambiguity of existence by adding another direction. Works such as Appealing to Emotions of Lascaux, Only Within This Reciprocity, Unclear Animal, and Passage, Pew, Reverse, and Well Floor Plan involve collected vintage photographs and images discovered on the internet transferred to the scraps of leather and added drawings. Images and symbols of unknown origins swirl chaotically on the irregularly shaped leather, which resembles the natural landscapes or the outlines of ancient maps. These images, mysterious and enigmatic due to the lack of information, metaphorically represent something but remain as empty symbols, much like their forgotten sources over time.”
− from the preface “Erased Metrics” by Minkyung Kim

WORK

Trace Study (series)
2024, sea mud stains on photograph, 15×22cm(ea)

“In Kang's work, exposed photography manifests in two distinct ways. The first is a literal technical process. The artist takes photographs printed on paper to the mudflats, where they are either left directly on the ground or secured in a net and retrieved after a few days. Exposed to natural elements such as waves and sunlight, the photographs accumulate a thin layer of sand, which leaves behind furrows and ridges. Occasionally, traces of human touch or man-made objects, such as nets, are also visible. In these exposed photographs, the artificial and the natural intermingle. The second aspect involves a place called Seomdolmoru, which the artist discovered by chance through an internet blog. The photographs—taken with a digital camera—were left by someone who visited the place where a resort development was initiated and subsequently abandoned during the Chun Doo-hwan regime. These images serve as a record of both the place and the photographs moving toward a time of decline. The artist also visited and photographed the site. However, as a result, the images in this exhibition end up diluting both metaphorically and materially, rather than adding depth to the narrative or history of the place, or even to the anecdotes of the blog owner and the artist.

(...)

If you examine the works, you'll notice that some are partially flaked off. This occurs where the sand is less uplifted and the force of the waves is stronger. The exposed photographs are not only records of erosion but also of deposition. As the waves pass, sunlight fades the photographs, and as the sand dries, it sticks and peels away. The resulting photographs capture the temporal and material flow of these two forces: deposition and erosion. To record this flow is to be within it. This flow is not aimed at complete disappearance or entirely new creation. Instead, the sand on the paper creates an image—a record—while the photographs evoke the past in the sunlight. The partially broken image undergoes a process similar to shedding in reptiles—not a complete transformation, but what remains despite it is in photography. (Shedding is based on repetition, not dramatic transformation.) By transforming through the process of working with both the medium of photography and its history, Kang’s photographic work reveals itself through exposure. Consequently—no, provisionally—exposed photography demonstrates a process of development within decline.”
− from “Exposed Photography: Being/Existing in the Flow of Photography and History” by Yuki Konno

WORK

Seomdolmoru Project
2020-2023

It is a photographic project documenting Seomdolmoru, a small uninhabited island located in the West Sea(Incheon, KR). The photographs were taken using a 4×5 large-format camera.

Seomdolmoru was developed in the late 1980s and is known to have been closely associated with the former Korean authoritarian regime. Conceived as a kind of “Western-style leisure town,” the site was shut down in the early 1990s, just before completion. Following an official demolition order, it has remained in a state of gradual decay, standing today as a slowly deteriorating ruin.