Suki Seokyeong Kang’s solo exhibition 《Mountain—Hour—Face》 is on view at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas.
 
The first solo exhibition by a South Korean artist in the museum’s history, it brings together nearly 40 works made between 2014 and 2024. The exhibition was first presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2025. Lauren Thompson, the McNay’s curator of exhibitions, adapted it for the museum’s galleries.

Kang combined sculpture, painting, textiles, and poetry to create environments in which visitors could experience the forms and rhythms of the natural world as they moved through the galleries. Two installations made with hwamunseok, on view in the United States for the first time, draw on chunaengmu (春鶯舞), a court dance from the late Joseon dynasty.
 
Also known as chunaengjeon (春鶯囀), the dance was first performed at an 1828 banquet at Changdeokgung Palace. Crown Prince Hyomyeong organized the banquet to mark the 40th birthday of his mother, Queen Sunwon. The solo dance evokes the song of an oriole in spring. On a woven mat measuring roughly 3.3 square meters, the dancer sweeps their long sleeves outward, turns in place, and lifts each foot in turn.

Handwoven from dried plant stems, the hwamunseok serves as both a stage for a single dancer and a boundary that defines the range of their steps. Kang suspended the mats from the gallery ceiling. In the dance, the performer moves within the edges of the mat. In the installation, visitors pass in front of and alongside it. As visitors change position, they see the mat’s surface and outline from different angles and notice how it relates to nearby works.

The slender aluminum mobiles in the ‘Mountain — hours’ series hang from the ceiling and move gently with the air currents. Poems accompany the mobiles, while the abstract sculptures in the ‘Tender Meander’ series suggest human figures. On loan from a Dallas-area collection, Grandmother Tower evokes the posture and presence of a person through structures that lean against and support one another.

As visitors walk among works suspended overhead, mounted on the walls, and set on the floor, the outlines of the works and the ways they overlap change with each viewpoint. The exhibition recalls a traditional East Asian landscape painting, with the view unfolding as visitors make their way through the galleries.

About the Artist
 
Suki Seokyeong Kang (1977–2025) was born in Seoul. She studied East Asian painting at Ewha Womans University and painting at the Royal College of Art in London. Her ‘Jeong (井)’ series grew out of her study of jeongganbo, a Joseon-era system of musical notation that uses square cells to record note lengths and rhythmic patterns. The way the hwamunseok defines the dancer’s space in chunaengmu informed her ‘Mat Black Mat’ series. Through these works, Kang extended the compositional principles of painting into sculpture, installation, video, and performance.
 
In 2018, Kang presented 《Black Mat Oriole》 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and received the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. She took part in the main exhibition of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 and presented 《Willow Drum Oriole》 at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul in 2023.

About the Museum
 
The McNay Art Museum opened in San Antonio in 1954 as the first museum of modern art in Texas. It occupies the former residence of painter and educator Marion Koogler McNay. Its collection includes works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Alice Neel, and sculptures are also displayed in the museum’s gardens.
 
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition: Suki Seokyeong Kang: Mountain—Hour—Face
Dates: October 30, 2026–January 24, 2027
Venue: McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, USA
Curator for the McNay presentation: Lauren Thompson
Website: Official exhibition page