Min Haeng Kang – See As One
February 16 – 26*
The Anderson is pleased to present See As One from VCUarts Craft/Material studies alumni Min Haeng Kang (MFA 2020). Kang’s exhibition consists of artworks installed in a fourth floor gallery as well as an installation on the mezzanine level window.
Kang will be on site to welcome visitors to this exhibition 2–6pm, February 23rd & 25th.
Artist Statement
When I was in Japan, I walked alone down some stone steps to visit a waterfall. I wanted to visit the waterfall to help prevent myself from becoming lost in thought, and spent about half an hour watching the water. Making my way back up the steps on my return, I found the body of an ant I must have stepped on as I approached, despite my habit of looking closely at the ground as I walk. In that moment, I knew no distinction between myself and the ant. The weight of all my own past and future mistakes made in ignorance became unbearable. I fell to the ground and cried with the ant, knees pulled into my chest.
My exhibition See As One is an expression of my constant awakening to the responsibility I have for mistakes made without awareness, which I realized one day after killing an ant. Through very delicate and time-consuming work I transform things that have been casually abandoned by a capitalist system that prioritizes efficient use of time, not the expansive potential of things. By rearranging waste into the forms of nerves, cells, and barnacles, I express things as beings with their own values and lives and make space for new neural pathways that allow us to move beyond human-centered thinking. I hope I can inspire people to ask questions about how we determine the value of that which we call “things”, and see all living and non-living things as one unified whole. This small shift can make ripples, that produce actions, that work to undo some of the consequences of human selfishness.
Bio
Min was born in Korea and majored in Korean Literature and Photography in Korea and started studying glass in Japan. She graduated as an honor student at Toyama City Institute of Glass Art in Japan. She created her work at the Utatsuyama craft workshop in Japan for three years with scholarship and awarded an honor researcher prize twice. She is the first person to receive the grand prize as a foreigner at the 69th annual Kanazawa Craft competition held in Kanazawa, a well-known ‘craft city’ in Japan and the first Korean to receive the grand prize at the Triennial International Exhibition of Glass Kanazawa competition in Japan. She also received a silver prize and special prize at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale competition in Korea. Her work was invited to the exhibition “COLOURS” at Hempel Glasmuseum in Denmark. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Cheongju International Biennale Committee, the Toyama Glass Art Museum, the Notojima Glass Art Museum, the Utatsuyama Craft Workshop and Toyama City Institute of Glass Art. Her work can be found in catalogs that were produced for several of the exhibition mentioned above as well as in New Glass Review 34.
Gallery Hours Tuesday–Friday 12–6pm, Saturday 12–5pm
*Exhibition extended from 2/23 to 2/26.