Exhibition view of “JUNG Kangja: It Has Always Been The Beginning” at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL. (November 15 – December 30, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and the gallery.JUNG Kangja: It Has Always Been The Beginning marks the artist’s solo exhibition, five years after her previous retrospective at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL and CHEONAN in 2018. The exhibition introduces Jung Kangja’s works from 1995 to 2010. In the underground floor and first-floor spaces of Arario Gallery Seoul, viewers can explore exotic landscapes and figures captured by Jung during her travels to various regions, including Central and South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific, from the 1980s to the early 1990s. The third- and fourth-floor spaces showcase Jung’s works from the 2000s, where she explores deep personal reflections characterized by the integration of primal landscapes and Janus’s significant motif.
Jung Kangja, the first-generation female performance artist in Korea, contributed significantly to the development of Korean experimental art from the 1960s to the 1970s. Her first solo exhibition, Incorporeality, presented in 1970, was forcibly removed due to its socially critical nature. Subsequently, the artist immigrated abroad, expressing inspiration gained from her travels through her artworks. Jung returned to Korea in the early 1980s and continued her consistent artistic activities, creating diverse paintings over more than 40 years. As a representative artist of Korean experimental art in the 1970s, Jung’s oeuvre is being reassessed and re-evaluated in various ways in Korea and abroad.
