[Gallery Walk] With the Hand That Painted Clouds, He Covered the Words of the Heart

Kang Woon's Solo Exhibition "Operation Cloud" at Surgery in Cheongdam-dong

Attaching Hanji and Covering Words... A Journey from Sky to Heart

The painter of clouds picked up a wooden chopstick. While creating the "Mind Walk" series, Kang Woon wrote conversations with his daughter on canvas and erased them. He repeatedly layered color over the words. If the writing had been meant for someone to read, there would have been no reason to cover it up. He brought the words in his heart to the surface, then let them remain beneath the color. Before looking at the beautiful colors in Kang Woon's paintings, it is worth considering this sequence of writing and covering.

Kang Un's "Pure Form - Green Cloud" (2007). The texture of the brushstrokes emerges between the green-tinted sky and clouds. Surgery.

"Operation Cloud," Kang Woon's solo exhibition at Gallery Surgery in Cheongdam-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, revisits this process through the idea of "surgery." The exhibition opens on October 27 and runs through December 12. While his solo exhibition "Born in Color," which ended at the Savina Museum on October 11, looked back at the evolution of his work from his early pieces to recent works, this exhibition focuses on the memories and emotions that accumulated along the way.

Kang Woon is often described as a "cloud painter." Even the "Woon" in his name means cloud. The nickname is fitting: he has worked with skies and clouds for many years, since his first solo exhibition at the Sungkok Art Museum in 1998. In his early "Pure Form" series, he painted cloud forms in a hyperrealistic style. But describing his later work simply as sky landscapes would overlook how the role of his hand changed even as he continued to create clouds.

For "Air and Dream," he layered pieces of thin hanji paper. Creating clouds that seemed to drift apart required repeatedly cutting and pasting small pieces of paper. The labor of the hand thus accumulated on a surface that appeared light. The focus of his painting shifted from how closely he could depict the contours of clouds to what kind of depth could emerge as the paper overlapped. Alongside the gaze that once looked up at the sky came the time spent by the body working with paper.

In "Drawing on Water," he makes strokes on wet hanji. Here, stopping a movement becomes as important as moving the hand. He can make a stroke, but he cannot use a brush to determine how the water seeps in and spreads. The artist engages with the surface differently when attaching hanji and when waiting for the water to spread. The clouds that Kang Woon has worked with for so long have also served as a way to test materials and time.

Kang Woon's "Creation - Door of the Heart" (2024). The work places clouds floating in a blue sky above and below dense traces of paint. Surgery.

In "Mind Walk," that time meets personal memory. Writing words on canvas and covering them with color is different from painting a blank surface on which nothing was written in the first place. The words came first; the color came after. Even if the sentences cannot be read in the finished painting, beneath the color lies the time in which something was already confessed. This is why, rather than explaining the work with the single word "healing," viewers are led to follow the process through which the artist applied each successive layer of color.

The word "operation" in the exhibition title carries both the meanings of surgery and a planned undertaking. It pairs clouds, whose forms are difficult to grasp, with a word that evokes precise incisions. The name of the exhibition space, "Surgery," also refers to a medical procedure. The combination could easily amount to no more than a play on words, but when applied to Kang Woon's work, it raises a concrete question: What does it mean to reopen a heart that has been covered over with color, and what is there to see?

The artist explained, "Here, 'surgery' is a metaphor for carefully opening the layers that have accumulated, one on top of another, in the heart." What matters in this statement is the word "carefully." It suggests an attitude of looking into accumulated time without damaging it, rather than a declaration of cutting out a wound all at once. Interpretations of his work as healing become more convincing when grounded in the specific acts of attaching hanji, making strokes, and applying color over writing.

The shift in Kang Woon's work from clouds to the heart cannot be explained by a change in subject alone. In his early work, he captured forms before his eyes on the surface; later, the process of attaching, waiting, and covering itself became the content of the painting. Kang Woon described his journey as one that "began with depicting forms, moved on to observing phenomena, and then, through acts and waiting, shifted toward questions of conditions and time." "Operation Cloud" is an exhibition that rereads the time he has accumulated while painting clouds as an effort to open the layers of the heart.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.