Full description from the venue
Seungkeun Jang is inside a cave of his own. The world is closed, and painting fills the cave. Muddy colors, blunt lines, layered brushstrokes. Paintings crudely patched and piled up. Paintings filled with relationships and tools that are nothing but Jang himself and his own extensions. Paintings of repetition, persisting in erasing and repainting. The exhibition is faithful in showing this oppressively cozy world of painting.
If something like anxiety or tension can be read here, it is probably because the “outside” of which this logic of closure is unwittingly conscious—that im/possibility—is being evoked. Meanwhile, the reason even this remains at the level of anxiety is that the outside of the cave is not visible at all. If so, must the world of the cave be escaped?
We have long harbored negative feelings toward the metaphor of the “cave.” Let us call it something like Plato’s curse. Foolish people spent their lives seeing only the shadows—projections of the reality outside the cave—mistaking them for reality itself. Then, one day, one person was drawn to the light outside the cave, and when he finally went outside and saw the world, he returned to the cave once more. And he proclaimed to the people, “The shadows are not everything—look outside.” But the people turned away from him. Far from looking back toward the outside, they burrowed further inward. Inside the cave, the shadows—the “images”—were already constituting each person’s own world, so the outside was unnecessary. They spoke of nothing else.
Even after coming to know that an outside exists, if one chooses to remain and keep watching the shadows, can the people inside the cave still be called foolish?
Kaja Silverman weighs in, unraveling the Platonic curse on images. Silverman points out that everyone comes to understand the world through their own sense. Because there is an “I” who senses, the world appears; the appearance of the world exists by way of my sense, the image I see; and I sense by responding to the existence of the world. People live in a world made of the images they themselves have seen, images that call out to them. Why would it not be so? “Seeing” is a universally human affair. And that this seeing occurs within each person’s own closed cave speaks to each one’s “singularity.” Thus the allegory of the cave becomes a metaphor for the “plurality of seeing.”
Here is an artist who has chosen to stay inside the cave. Jang’s work is in the midst of a painterly journey that establishes a self-enclosed world and hesitates to step (once again) outside it. While repeating particular motifs and replicating images of his own, he carries out a reflection and exploration of the medium of painting in a “recursive” manner. First, in this exhibition, “the act of painting” shows a marked difference compared to about two years ago. Jang, who had previously been painting the objects and people around him with relatively quick brushwork, thin lines, flat strokes, and pale layers, attempts in this exhibition a movement in the opposite direction. The brushwork he describes as “slow and blunt” accumulates in layers to build up strata on the surface, reinforcing a muddy impression in place of the freshness once shown by the smooth, thin finishes of the past. This will physically underpin the recurring iconography and the painting’s internal structure—points to be addressed next—thereby completing the logic of the cave.
A motif that frequently appears in the recent paintings is Jang’s studio. In 2024, as he relocated his base from Chuncheon to Seoul, Jang found himself with no choice but to use his home and studio as one combined space. Watching the canvases physically fill the space and grow ever thicker, soon encroaching even into his living quarters, he felt no small regret at the fact that they kept piling up, unable to go “outside.” At the same time, he was also continuing a daily life in which he rarely left that space, at once studio and home. But at some point, he came to acknowledge that, within that space characterized by “stacking and stagnation,” the cave formed of canvases was itself the very condition for making new images.
In Dry and Unmistakable Love Toward the Inevitable (2025), Seoul (2025), Bad Early Summer (2025), and others, Jang stages scenes in which the accumulating canvases, the images within the canvases, and the interior and exterior of the studio are brought into a single view and layered over one another. On the one hand there is the interior of the studio—an open easel, a hand holding a cigarette or a brush, a palette and brush, scattered papers—while the same painting (or an adjacent one) also includes outdoor spaces such as a blue sky, flocks of birds flying in scattered clusters, fragments of cloud, the roof of the house next door, a clothesline atop that roof, as well as iconography drawn under the influence of other works; and the time-space within the painting takes on a new configuration. Images cross one another without boundary—or rather, they deliberately cross the boundary—expanding the time-space within the painting, so that the place called the “studio,” once a closed structure, becomes complete in itself, without limit. Cases in which another sheet of paper or canvas is physically attached on top of a painting can be understood in a similar way ( Open System , 2025; The Person Behind the Painting , 2026). The readymade is not introduced to call to mind a different context. All elements are arranged within the “image world,” and seeking or distinguishing an inside and outside at the level of actuality is futile.
It is also characteristic of this exhibition that Jang frequently places himself and his lover into the paintings. Here, the figure is not a device that reveals a heterogeneity reaching toward a different genre or form. Rather, the paintings in which the figure appears form the same context as the studio paintings examined earlier, and merely confirm the closedness that runs across this exhibition as a whole. To put it plainly, all the iconography can even seem to point to Jang himself, and this holds true whether it is reduced to a hand holding a brush ( Seoul , 2025) or a severed foot ( The Wordless Foot , 2025), or varied into the figure of a woman, usually crouched and gazing straight ahead. In other words, a form that might be called an “expanded self-portrait” recurs throughout the exhibition. Here, self-portrait refers to a painting that takes on an internally closed structure and gaze—a painting that ultimately belongs to a single person’s imaginary.
The pictorial form of the self-portrait becomes even more clearly distinguished when compared to photographic images of the “selfie” type. The selfie likewise shares the feature of capturing the “I” that is the subject producing the image, but it operates inversely to the self-portrait in that its gaze has been othered. The self-portrait, as the long tradition of painting has presupposed, exists by an internal logic rather than by drawing in or being conscious of an external gaze. Unlike the “selfie,” which is conscious of a third-party gaze and refracts the lens to reveal the self as an other, the one who paints looks into and weaves the self within an inner frame that the self has posited. That is, the self-portrait is an image that ceaselessly turns its gaze inward. One might even say that Jang’s paintings, passing through various motifs, ultimately resolve into the form of the “self-portrait.”
Consider, for instance, the figure that appears in Dry and Unmistakable Love Toward the Inevitable , A Smoke Between Us (2025), and Cliff (2026). A motionless posture, an expression that does not draw the viewer in, opaque eyes without a gaze, a mass of color planes that stays within the world of the painting.... This figure, a form modeled on Jang’s lover, appears not as some “other” but merely as an objet woven together by his own gaze. Let us take one more example. In When Attitude Becomes Form (2026), the figure shows Jang lying down with a brush in hand, and here, the mirror positioned in the foreground reveals his face, even though the composition—with the person lying behind the mirror—means it should not be able to do so. This is an irrational conclusion within an understanding of painting grounded in perspective, but it becomes possible within the grammar of the self-portrait, in which the gaze inside the painting ultimately returns to the self. In this way, Jang’s paintings, in iconography and composition alike, all point in a single direction. The image circles within the cave of the “I.”
A clear contradiction resides in the two examples above. First, in the former, a kind of ethical tension arises—the problem of a male painter’s objectification of women, among others—while in the latter, confusion arises from the fact that the internal structure of the painting does not cohere. This kind of contradiction, in Plato’s view, shares its conclusion precisely with the allegory of the cave. And that is precisely the point: the owner of each individual cave is limited by being captive to a doxa of their own, unable to face absolute truth. For no matter what one “sees,” the shadow appears only as an object given shape in each person’s own particular way. Moreover, since everyone is under the spell of mistaken illusions within their own cave, a “truth” that could encompass them all can never be reconciled.
But for Silverman, rereading Hannah Arendt, this is entirely to be expected: the “permanent” difference among “seeings” that never reconcile confirms that the understanding of the world exists/appears only through difference. And in that difference and gap, we merely recall each person’s desire—a desire that is always unfulfilled—and a certain lack. (This is not to say the contradiction is entirely resolved. Let us simply say that its place shifts.) In this way, the metaphor of the “light” that once led toward the “outside” of the cave is recalibrated into a fundamental lack that the image before our eyes is thought to have lost, or to have forgotten. A Platonic “Truth,” or an abstract idea, is not what is at issue. Pessimism about this lack is therefore also unnecessary. For one might even say that this lack itself becomes a driving force, constituting the images within the cave.
Let us return here to the question first posed at the outset. Must the world of the cave be escaped? Even after coming to know that an outside exists, if one chooses to remain and keep watching the shadows, are the people inside the cave still foolish? If one still hesitates to answer “no,” the angle of the question can be twisted somewhat. What is happening to the images inside the cave, while each person, unwilling to look straight at the light, holds fast to a cave of their own? One can ask whether some gap might be forming there; whether, even without turning the body around and trudging out into that world of light, into the outside, traces of lack and loss might not be found within the image; and whether an occasion might not arise for touching the other in this way, or, conversely, for drawing the other in.
If one caveat may be added, it seems that in Jang’s paintings this is confirmed through “letterforms.” For the most part, these letterforms are empty signs bearing no meaning. Jang would plainly inscribe letters onto the studio floor within the painting, onto the canvas within the painting. The letters are clearly legible, but that kind of “reading” does not set into motion a meaning that governs the painting as a whole. Here, reading is nothing more than a moment that exerts a visual pull. Flower (2025) can serve as an example. In the painting, structures that together form a triangular composition—an easel, a table, and the like—fill the center of the picture plane, inducing a sense of upward movement within an otherwise stable overall composition, and at the apex of that movement, where a canvas would be placed, the character 꽃 (flower), written in large, drawn strokes, appears as a letterform. Here, 꽃 , a single word made of a single syllable, activates, prior to any other semantic operation, the visual act of simply making the eye “read.” Because of this, the letterform briefly shifts a force that had only ever worked inward within the painting, moving it outward, toward the viewer. The letterform, now become image, momentarily evokes a different orientation, and even when the painting hastily returns to its internal logic, it leaves that possibility open.
The cave is a world of images. Images, which are illusions and yet also each carry their own truth, take their closedness as their very nature and thereby prepare for a different encounter. Jang’s painting experiments with closed scenes that operate as a “world” unto themselves, leading one to expect that they will open a gap. Whether he, who has for now decided to linger, will at some moment stride into another world, I do not know. For now, since we too have set foot here, let us also linger for a moment.