Jioong Kang
Phototaxis – Shadows Beyond the Sun
3 April – 29 May 2026

Jioong Kang’s work unfolds through a poetic yet experimental engagement with the photographic image. While grounded in photography, his practice gradually displaces the medium’s limits, allowing the work to shift toward a more unstable condition: a surface, an object, at times even a fragile sculptural presence.

Rather than treating the photograph as a fixed representation, Jioong approaches it as a material surface, one open to transformation. Images are transferred onto linen, leather fragments, or salvaged wood and subjected to processes of submersion, exposure, folding, and abrasion. Through these encounters with water, light, and time, the picture slowly departs from its original form. Marks, residues, and irregular textures settle across its surface, generating new traces.

What might first appear as damage gradually reveals itself as a record of interaction. The photograph becomes a site where environmental forces and the artist’s gestures converge, suspended between original and copy, intention and accident.

This exploration began with Jioong’s encounters with the abandoned island of Seomdolmoru on South Korea’s western coast. While photographing its deserted structures and remnants, the artist began to question the act of photographing itself. The prints were later returned to the tidal flats, where waves, mud, and sunlight gradually altered their surfaces.

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.

Within these shifting conditions, shadows appear where they are least expected—across altered materials, reversed planes, and weathered textures, as if drifting beyond their source. What remains are images that no longer fully belong to their origin, but persist as quiet traces between presence and disappearance.

Past Exhibition

Alma Feldhandler

The Latest Thing

15 Jan 2026  – 26 Mar 2026

Clemens von Wedemeyer

Social Geometry

22 Nov 2025  – 9 Jan 2026

MRW Inaugural Exhibition

Dreamed Last Night

2 Sep – 7 Nov 2025