Minhee Kang (b.1994, Seoul) currently lives and works in London, UK. She has completed her MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art (2021) and has a BFA in Textiles from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence (2017). Kang investigates the relationship between time, space, phenomena, and the beholder. She studies the effects of materiality through the subtle play of light on surfaces and explores transitory natural phenomena that evoke a sense of impermanence and fragility. Her practice extends into the creation of conditions or circumstances that translate a volatile moment of the ‘here’ and ‘now’, the ephemeral and immaterial, into a tangible experience. She is increasingly working in time-based media, using process as the medium but also interrogating how technology may be subtly engaged with in human terms. This is sought to achieve an expanding expression of digital data that moves the work into the realms of the poetic and non-fiction, delivering a suggestion of introspective “time-ness” to the participants.
Minhee Kang
My research and practice incorporate installation and site-specific light and material documentation. In search of a ‘veil’ – a transparent, translucent, and reflective surface to look through – I work with light and space to bring together subjective perception and the spatial and temporal qualities of a specific environment.
My recent projects ponder the idea of a frame as a way of foregrounding conversations about the mediated experience of the ephemeral. Exploring layers of spatial distance experienced when perceiving information through the threshold of an architectural window or a digital media screen, I expand an enclosed private space into an emotional landscape, expressed as a subjective ‘time-space’. I question the continuity of time by suggesting a poetic space that breaks with linear clock-time and isolates the beholder – a fragile ball of life – from the fast-changing outside world encountered through the projected ‘window’.
Vanitas Vertigo Venus (2021) is an installation piece that invites viewers into an enclosed space denoting a disarrayed time-space of the distant planet, Venus, where a day is longer than a year, and the sun rises and sets twice a day. The LED, framed in the shape of a Chinese character <日> meaning ‘day’ or ‘sun’, is programmed to change its brightness in relation to the concept of the 24-hour clock that we understand and live by. The viewer experiences a space which varies in light and shade according to the time of the day when they visit and encounters their portrait in the middle of the room reflected on the surface of a fragile glass ball. This is originally inspired by Pieter Claesz’s still-life painting, where the artist depicted himself in a room in natural light on the surface of a glass orb. Moment-by-moment changes are drawn on a brittle surface while the blown glass ball hovers in the air, barely maintaining its own balance until it drops as it loses its stability.
Medium:
Programmed LED, realtime clock sensor, Arduino board, MDF, polycarbonate, neutral density filter, blown glass, levitating module
Now and Here (2020) is a real-time interactive performance piece carried out in a room where the framework of ‘time’ was driven by a private and truly personal form of data, my own heartrate. Like a metronome that internalizes a sense of timing for musicians, the clock in the room ticks with every heartbeat, never going forward but always only returning to the same spot. The clock’s hands point to each present moment. Changing absolute time to something personal and private, the clock replaces time with a performer.
My research and practice evoke the concept from Oriental mythology of the Creation of Heaven and Earth to explore the metaphysics of presence, recognising the notion of a homologous relationship between the macrocosm of nature and the microcosm of the human body. I convey this interconnectedness by constructing a real-time interactive space where a person experiences a transient and subjective conception of their own body system, thus creating their own visceral and illusory intimate landscape. This is generated by a form of physical computing that – when combined with creative coding – transforms real-time body data into a poetic manifestation encapsulating the participant’s spacetime.
Medium:
steel, 3D printed transparent clock hand, heart rate wireless sensor, Arduino board, servo motor
Cut-out Light (2021) is a site-specific work made in my empty studio located in the Darwin Building, RCA.
Medium:
Light Installation
I Solar You (2021) is a series of image works made during a collaborative workshop with the Freud Museum in London. Traversing the Freudian psychoanalytic theory of the opposing Eros and Death drives, I explored the behaviour of a magnifying lens under the sun by holding it over the delicate flower. While the flower is observed closely through the lens, the sunlight ultimately sets it alight, destroying it. The depicted shadow of the phenomenon cast on lightweight paper is illusory and transient, yet the burnt stains remain.