Architecture of Longing
Sage Jeehee Kang & Minjung Lee

In our technocratic hyper mobile society, isolation is the prevalent result of layered forms of disconnection. When left unaddressed, subtly slowly its incessant creep leaves people in a state of perpetual dislocation—fragmentary, empty. When communicating across languages, geographic variabilities, recalling past chapters into present experiences, and body languages between incongruous nervous system states, loss always occurs in these acts of translation.Impositions of linguistic incongruity, cultural translation, and geospatial migration each heighten the mutability of memory’s terrain, while sharpening both artists’ search for fixed remnants to claim a comprehensive rootedness of ‘self’.

Sage JeeHee Kang’s newest body of work self-actualizes a deeply rooted cohesive relocating of the self by addressing past experiences in the present, first moving through them and reassessing their impact on one’s path, and secondly through expressing active agency towards shaping one’s own future in alignment with the values, priorities, and motivations of the authentic self. Stepping through the open doors of each new chapter in life, one can believe the novelty of a new environment incites fresh momentum towards a new horizon line–or an unknown auspicious future. Once its unique rhythm has been established and the key envisioned milestones of aspiration have been reached, the unprocessed past creeps in through the steady pace of familiarity awaiting a space to be acknowledged. Rekindling the creative self, while disquietingly sensing the unspoken stories of past lives; the artist understands the need for reflection to receive full truths unlocking claims to one’s whole self.

In the camera series, hand-cast hanji (traditional Korean paper) sculptures mimic historic models of outmoded technology layered with photographic transfers of people—mothers, husbands, grandfathers, sisters, cousins, neighbors—from earlier generations seen through its lens. The concrete mirror of real moments in time now past, the photographs produced by these machines are a transfer of photons and chemicals conjuring private nostalgic connections between family, friends, and personal communities. Time compresses, layers of earlier generations’ oral traditions, memorialized photographs, and physiological traces of dissipated electromagnetic atomic mass perhaps accepted as ancestral guides active yet unseen in this realm. Both the paper silhouette and the photographic print vary through this act of transference, undergoing nearly undetectable losses, as the ‘truth-telling’ of the image–a fragment removed from an infinite environment–has lost all information laying beyond the view finder’s limits.

These continual transformations instantiate the photolytic reality of unavoidable vulnerabilities produced from chemical reactions. Certain new environments or experiences act as catalytic sparks that compress time urging momentous change while remaining intact once the reaction is complete. Therefore the fully integrated self remains even after traces of earlier versions of oneself have disappeared or dematerialized, as can be sensed in Presence (Latent), 2026. Combining found images with the historic craft of Korean hanji paper remain ghostly simultaneously present, yet distant in time of wisp of a memory unable to be called forth completely, are both the alchemical outcome of solvent transfers as well as the replication of the embodied experience of accessing
one’s personal memories.

The proto-conscious limitations of memory raise questions of the unadulterated source of reminiscences and the veracity of this immaterial information for constructing one’s identity. Firmly rooting one’s self in the present in a wholistic manner often requires a confrontation of lineage as the continuous thread linking previous generations that cellularly and emotionally formed who one has become in this current moment, as well as providing cohesive structure for constructing how one will decide to impact those they connect with in the future.The Japanese tradition of the bonsai, or cultivation of a living fragment of a tree within one’s own home, as a daily meditation on control and peace achieved through harmonious beauty, here continues into impacts a family tree has on shaping its fruits or individuals imposed upon philosophically, spiritually, and psychologically by these connective relationships. Reconciling generational pasts to fuel the future with intention, the artist aims to empower to shape a new path for one’s self.

Negative space—the physical distance between two bodies—is never a void, it has active materiality lubricating the capacity for consciousness to become linked, forming the circuits for possible geospatial connectivity. The threshold of REM sleep—identified by rapid eye movement—also signals the beginning of a proto-conscious state of being. Minjung Lee’s work investigates the realm between the incongruencies of embodied memory and site specificity of place. Through mimesis—painstaking reinstatement of acute details sourced from intergenerational exchanges—fixed interiors are delineated upon built-up matte board lengths, therein replete with layered histories. As living present non-spaces, through their artifice remaining uncannily sparse, yet are intended as schema for actuating deep meditative engagement.

Swathes of white ground insinuate empty wall space within these mounted pictorial sculptures, where meticulous recreation of hyper realistic details balance each composition with the beveled edges and flat planks of a continuous skirting board. This leitmotif unites each distinct composition as one snapshot of an imagined ambiguous interior. The subtle ruptures between a physical outlet and a reconstruction of an outlet (complete with cord plugged in) alludes to unseen corridors, quietly indicating additional presence within this shared space just beyond the perceivable limits of the viewer’s range. At once familiar, categorically known, yet simultaneously beyond complete comprehension, each work is a site of liminal interfacing.

The quiet rhythm of the works almost subconsciously calls to mind the subtle hum of industrially bureaucratic fluorescent overhead lights. The mind fills in information intentionally vacant in the image as flickers of micro-consciousness, fragmentary sensations emerging within the body awakening a deeper embodied connectivity between the viewer’s mind’s eye and the animating force within their physical form. This acute hyperawareness of one’s living presence provides a safe space for metacognition of one’s own accountability for acknowledging time’s limitations and imposed pressures, while empowering a critique of the systemic structures we unconsciously allow ourselves to be bound within. A tromp l’oiel reconstruction—not for the purpose of anti-capitalist critique, as in the photographic installations of Thomas Demand, but— aiming for the “reconcillation of opposites, achieving a synthesis in her examination of the dialectical nature of reality and illusion”(1) in keeping with Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s 1970s conceptual print series of floors and rulers. The recurring motif of the ruler foregrounds the unquestioned veracity of empirical acknowledgement and systems of measured thought–socially, politically, and durationally.

Geospatial connectivity—the perceptual limits of sharing simultaneous experience between two bodies—is buffered with negative space, which is not void, but a plane in which two perceiving entities can choose to allow connection or propagate disconnection. Beyond language, without words, electromagnetic exchange of nervous systems signal across these spans. Within this proposed liminal space of the artist’s creation, awareness of the impacts of continuing psychological isolation or disconnection within the calm of the gallery rise internally to new stakes of urgent awareness. Viewers newly aware of the impact of these often subconscious patterns can carry forward with them their own agency towards structuring their embodied presence for new outcomes of significant magnitude. As many people are not provided the luxury of sharing space with those most meaningful to them, then the present reality—if the present moment is all we have—, it should not be wasted.

The floor installation Here, 2026 is a conceptual site-specific sculptural installation that is an assemblage portrait of a disassembled artwork frame peering through the floor’s surface as a glimpse through the glass panel itself. Functioning not as a closed circuit, or autonomous system, its intermediary temporal state is metaphorically reflecting how societally imposed boundaries of accepted governing structures unknowingly shape our life’s journey. By revealing the complex layers of the psychological limiting frameworks we exist within, acknowledgement of these intangible structures’ existence liberates the viewer allowing alternative structures to be proposed or enacted: better suited to one’s own personal harmonious alignment.

Unseen forces persistently shaping present lives, uncovered through the artist’s investigative labor, are the crux of these two new bodies of work. Providing space for reflection allows meta cognition to discern the impacts of dislocation, isolation, vulnerability, and inter-change that occurs through transference. Energetic and aesthetic transference are dual materialities, the active matter of these works, invite viewers to hold space to discern and decipher these discrete psycho-social realms.  


Carson Woś
Guest Curator, In Practice

 

Carson Woś is a textile historian, arts administrator, and contributor to Cultbytes, whose research investigates the intersection of fiber art and global feminisms. Bringing over 14 years of experience across museum fundraising, art market data tracking, curatorial research, and exhibition operations, she currently serves as Associate Director of Donor Relations at the Museum of Arts and Design. Woś has held previous positions at Artnet, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and MoMA PS1 in addition to roles as Development Officer at The Immigrant Artist Biennial and Project Manager at The OG magazine. Woś holds an MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from Bard Graduate Center, and an MA (Hons) in Art History from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.