[ 쇼벨 ] Plural Perceptions and the Deconstructed Self: The Pictorial Landscapes of Kang Chul-gyu's T…
Offering for the New, 2026 Oil on canvas, 227 x 182 cm ( artist KANG Cheolgyu ) ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL ( 85, Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul ) presents Discarded Host, a solo exhibition by KANG Cheolgyu (b. 1990), on view from May 1 (Fri) to June 20 (Sat), 2026. KANG has developed a body of work that transforms lived reality into an imagined painterly realm, drawing from personal experience and psychological sensations rooted in the inner self. Rather than directly depicting specific events, he concentrates on the moment when emotions and memories crystallize into visual form, composing psychological scenes in which anxiety, tension, and unfamiliar sensations quietly persist. By projecting the self onto figures and narratives situated within fictional environments, his paintings engage in an indirect confrontation with identity, constructing a visual narrative that reflects an ongoing process of personal transformation. Composed of new paintings, this exhibition highlights a perceptual shift evident in KANG’s recent practice. The works move away from understanding the self as a fixed and unified entity, instead proposing it as a fluid condition shaped by intertwined perceptions, sensations, emotions, and recollections. The exhibition follows how this conceptual transition emerges through evolving pictorial motifs, revealing that symbolic images—previously appearing through fragmentation and cohesion, distortion and continuity—are not markers of internal deficiency but outcomes of multiple modes of perception operating simultaneously. KANG Cheolgyu was born in Gimcheon, Korea in 1990. He received his BFA in Painting in 2015 and MFA in Fine Arts in 2019 from Hannam University. He has held solo exhibitions at Gallery IN HQ (Seoul, Korea, 2024), Chapter II (Seoul, Korea, 2022), M2 Project-room at Lee Ungno Museum (Daejeon, Korea, 2021), Artist Residency TEMI (Daejeon, Korea, 2020), and Gallery Gabi (Seoul, Korea, 2018), among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Museumhead (Seoul, Korea, 2025), Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2025), Schema Art Museum (Cheongju, Korea, 2024), Daejeon Museum of Art (Daejeon, Korea, 2024, 2021, 2018), WWNN (Seoul, Korea, 2024), ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2024), Gallery Baton (Seoul, Korea, 2022), and Gwang Gallery, Sejong Center for the Performing Arts (Seoul, Korea, 2015).installation view of KANG Cheolgyu's solo exhibition from May 1 (Fri) to June 20 (Sat), 2026 at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL ( 85, Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul ) He participated in residency programs at Artist Residency TEMI in 2020 and Studio White Block Cheonan in 2023. KANG was selected as a Kumho Young Artist in 2024. His works are held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea Art Bank; Seoul Museum of Art; Daejeon Museum of Art; and the ARARIO Collection. ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL presents Discarded Host, a solo exhibition by KANG Cheolgyu, on view from 1 May to 20 June 2026. KANG Cheolgyu has developed a body of work that transforms lived reality into an imagined painterly realm, drawing from personal experience and psychological sensations rooted in the inner self. Rather than directly depicting specific events, the artist concentrates on the moment when emotions and memories crystallize into visual form, composing psychological scenes in which anxiety, tension, and unfamiliar sensations quietly persist.By projecting the self onto figures and narratives situated within fictional environments, his paintings engage in an indirect confrontation with identity, constructing a visual narrative that reflects an ongoing process of personal transformation. Composed of new paintings, this presentation at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL highlights a perceptual shift evident in KANG’s recent practice.The exhibition The Abandoned Host departs from the conventional understanding of the self as a single, fixed center, instead exploring the plural structure of senses and perceptions that constitute existence. Rather than viewing the self as a unified entity, this exhibition regards it as a fluid state where anxiety, impulse, memory, and emotion operate in parallel, focusing on the new sensory order that emerges after the deconstruction of the center. The "host" is proposed as a space through which various senses and impulses pass and linger, while the "abandoned" state is interpreted not as a loss, but as the potential for another condition of existence. At the same time, the exhibition reveals unknown layers of reality and psychological landscapes through a pictorial world that crosses the boundary between reality and fiction, exploring how we sense our changing existence amidst the uncontrolled generation of images and sustained tension. Ultimately, The Abandoned Host asks what is possible after the center is gone, allowing us to contemplate plural senses and the uncertainty of existence within a pictorial arena.Kang Chul-gyu’s artistic world has developed as a pictorial practice that explores the process by which internal sensations such as anxiety, tension, self-doubt, and threat take shape as images, based on personal psychological experiences and ontological questions. Instead of reproducing emotions or explaining them through narratives, his work captures the moments when psychological states condense into distorted figures, monstrous entities, unfamiliar landscapes, and scenes of confrontation and threat. Reality and fiction, representation and fantasy do not separate but intersect within his canvas, where fictional images function not as mere imagination divorced from reality, but as a way to reveal another unperceivable layer of the real. His recent works move away from the narrative of a strong subject to more fully foreground structures of fragmentation, parallel perception, and the shaking and enduring of existence, expanding painting into a psychological landscape where questions and tension persist rather than serving as a release for emotions. In particular, the uncontrolled generation of images, a pictorial attitude that embraces coincidence and error, and the handling of a multi-layered structure of consciousness rather than a single center are highly prominent in his recent work. Anagnorisis , 2026 Oil on canvas 97 x 130.3 cmKang’s work has long originated from the question of what constitutes the self, yet this question expands beyond a simple search for self-identity into a more fundamental inquiry regarding whether the self can even exist as a center. In his work, questions lead back to self-doubt and self-censorship rather than heading toward answers, forming a chain of repetitions that functions as the very structure of thought driving his practice. In his early works, the self functioned as a central sense sustaining the inner world, and the figures confronting and struggling were an extension of that. However, unexplainable physical pain, continuous anxiety, and repeated doubt made it difficult to view the self as a single entity, leading to the realization that the self believed to be identical actually fragments and transforms depending on the situation, operating as a parallel structure of multiple senses. The One Without Ankles (2025) and Slight Fever (2025) stand at the starting point of this shift in perception, dealing with the anger and helplessness arising from pain, as well as the discrepancy between sensation and proof, thereby shaking reality perception itself. Subsequently, Epiphany (2026) and Nausea (2025) move beyond the issue of pain to the problems of reality and fiction, and the self and illusion, revealing the realization that the self may be an illusion rather than a solid entity. In this process, the "host" emerges as the core concept penetrating this exhibition, proposed no longer as a vessel where the self resides, but as a physical place occupied by various senses, impulses, memories, and emotions. The Abandoned Host (2026) and Anagnorisis (2026) deal with the cracks in the central self and the conditions of existence thereafter, expanding his work into a pictorial practice that questions what other forms of existence are revealed when the center is shaken, rather than merely explaining a single self.The monstrous entities, bizarre forms, and overwhelming landscapes that appear on Kang’s canvas are closer to the results of sensible reality emerging as forms, rather than being products of fictional imagination. His images operate as events where sensations of anxiety, tension, anger, and threat occur, rather than explaining specific symbols. A particularly notable point in his recent work is that the structure of antagonism has shifted from external opposition to internal conflict. Antagonist (2026) reveals that hostility is not just an external target but also an internal condition, while Consciousness Reef (2026) shows that the self is not a single center but a collective of coexisting plural senses and impulses through a scene where different consciousnesses rise together. The proliferating forms within the canvas reveal an unintegrated flow of consciousness while simultaneously forming a state of tension that recognizes and endures it. On the other hand, Mowing (2026) deals with the impulse to organize or eliminate these multiple consciousnesses. However, this elimination does not result in complete erasure but leads to repetition and return, revealing a situation where control and deconstruction occur simultaneously. These two works present the self not as a fixed entity, but as a process in which different consciousnesses are generated, collided, and adjusted.In Kang’s paintings, emotions are not resolved, threats are not eliminated, and the self is never fully integrated; instead, they diffuse, vanish, and amplify again, lingering on the canvas. Painting functions as a field where tension and questions persist rather than presenting solutions. In this context, his recent works can be read as a process of exploring how existence can be reconstructed after the center is shaken, rather than declaring the collapse of the self. Senses operating in parallel, the uncontrolled generation of images, and the way of thinking while enduring uncertainty and tension constitute the core of this work. Ultimately, his recent work asks what is possible after the abandoned center, demonstrating within the painting that this inquiry does not easily conclude. This transition is developed in a more complex manner in Phantoms of the Center (2026), where headless figures, floating faces, and bodies transformed into rocky cliffs are juxtaposed to visualize a plural consciousness rather than a singular self. Pan's Rejection, 2026 Oil on canvas, 53.3 x 46 cm (left), 53.3 x 46 cm (right)Here, the "phantom" refers to an entity that was believed to have perished but remains in the image and repeatedly returns. This reveals the human form latent within symbolic iconography, showing that the traces of the self have not been entirely erased from the center of all images. The desire to represent the deconstructed central self as a human figure, even while recognizing it as an illusion and deconstructing it, persists within the work. This tension is a point where the perception to accept the deconstructed self and the desire to use its residue as a driving force of expression coexist, and this very contradiction functions as a core expressive method of his work.Amidst these shifts in perception, Pan's Rejection (2026) transforms scenes where desire, rejection, and anxiety intersect, drawing from the half-man, half-beast Pan of Greek mythology and the mermaid of European folklore, which have repeatedly appeared in his past works. Trap (2026) composes a canvas where tension and anxiety accumulate through symbolic images and snake forms that repeatedly appear in medieval German painting, while Self-Portrait Still Life (2026) crosses the boundaries between still life and self-portrait within the tradition of classical still life painting, revealing a structure made of overlapping plural images rather than a fixed self. Consequently, these works show a point where different visual languages naturally connect, transform, and generate within the process of changing self-perception, rather than being a result of disconnection from the past. For Kang, painting is not an expression of emotion but a field of practice for exploring existence. Rather than problem-solving or emotional release, his work is closer to a process of accumulating thought while maintaining a state where questions and senses persist. The accidental shapes arising from the layers of the canvas and the failure of representation are all accepted as elements constituting the work. Shadows in the Core , 2026 Oil on canvas 291 x 197 cmThis attitude extends beyond a self-centered narrative into a pictorial methodology where multiple consciousnesses operate simultaneously. Sacrifice for the New (2026) actively accepts the traces of pictorial failure and revision, where the traces arising from the failure of planning and the process of correction are transformed into conditions for generating images rather than defects, absorbed into the work to function as a force building the form. In this process, conflicting senses and unintentional image generation occur simultaneously. As such, his painting blurs the boundary between reality and fiction, forming a new psychological landscape through the overlapping and intersection of images. Self-Portrait Still Life, 2025 Oil on canvas, 32 x 41 cm
