Drowning in Blue

Minju Kang

Info: The exhibition marks Minju Kang’s first solo presentation with Sies + Höke, assembling a body of work that stages uncanny landscapes and stream-of-consciousness narratives. At first encounter, her paintings appear to obey the conventions of realism: mountains, highways, or domestic creatures are rendered with measured precision. Yet closer scrutiny reveals disjunctions and humorous incongruities — a spectral figure halts traffic on an otherwise empty road, a pavilion glows improbably upon a diminutive island, or a fluorescent gummy bear confronts the gentle bulk of an alpaca. It is within this oscillation between the plausible and the absurd that the essence of Kang’s practice emerges. By altering and obscuring reality, she constructs pictorial worlds that are at once unsettling and endearingly comic. Humor functions here not as mere embellishment, but as a structural device: it destabilizes perception, softens the uncanny, and compels viewers to linger in the interstices between recognition and estrangement. Kang’s paintings thus offer a site where fleeting thoughts and subconscious impulses are transformed into images that sustain both critical reflection and amused wonder.