Ik-Joong Kang

Alumni Profile: Ik-Joong Kang, M.F.A. '88

Alumnus Ik-Joong Kang, M.F.A. Fine Arts '88, has lived in New York City since 1984 when he left Korea to pursue an advanced degree at Pratt Institute. As a student holding two part-time jobs, he felt compelled to make creative use of the many hours he spent shuttling around the city by subway, so he carried with him small canvases measuring 3 x 3 inches. Working in small scale while in transit, Kang made thousands of canvases that pulsed with the rhythm and life of the city he was experiencing and later arranged them into grids to form art installations.

Kang has since exhibited worldwide in prestigious venues, including two shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He represented Korea at the 1997 Venice Biennale, where he was awarded The Special Merit Prize. That same year Kang showed English Garden, an installation resembling a Buddhist temple covered in small paintings, at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia; tapes broadcast both chanting Korean monks and English language lessons, references to his childhood in an occupied country living between two cultures, Korean and American.

Marriage and fatherhood propelled Kang's interest in children's art as a means of promoting children's rights. "During the last 12 years, I've collected over 500,000 children's drawings from all over the world," he says proudly, recalling that "Pratt was the only art school I had known when I was in Korea, and so I applied. I thought art was something to be afraid of or agonized over" until his first day at Pratt when a professor asked him whether he enjoyed making art.

Kang is pictured before his immense 2007 mural Mountain and Wind, an installation composed of 2,611 panels of Moon Jar, a uniquely Korean ceramic form, which Kang uses as an icon of Korean reunification. The mural conceals the site where a major national monument, Gwanghwamun gatehouse, is being rebuilt.

Features Archive

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Alumni Profile: Ik-Joong Kang, M.F.A. '88
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