Joohyun Kang​: After Survival - Still & Life

 

Sept. 22 – Oct. 31, 2026

Opening Reception:  Thursday, September 24, 6 - 8 p.m

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Paris Koh, located at 509 West 23rd Street, Ground Floor, New York City, is proud to present After Survival - Still & Life, a solo exhibition by New York–based artist Joohyun Kang, on view from September 22 through October 31, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 24, from 6–8 PM, preceded by a special Tango Night on Wednesday, September 23, from 5–8 PM.

 

Spanning works from 2005 to 2017, After Survival - Still & Life revisits a pivotal period in Kang’s more than three-decade artistic practice. The exhibition considers these earlier works as an archive of survival-a visual record of how vulnerability, competition, displacement, and resilience shaped her artistic language and ultimately led toward the quieter, contemplative sensibility of her recent work.

 

Kang left Korea for the United States in 1992, building her life and practice within the realities of immigration and cultural displacement. She describes this experience through the metaphor of grafting-a small branch attaching itself to a larger tree, enduring a difficult process of adaptation before eventually taking root and blooming in unfamiliar soil.

These concerns are particularly visible in Kang’s Power Games series (2005-2017), in which flora and fauna become metaphors for domination, destruction, survival, and renewal. Eagles, phoenixes, serpents, birds, and insects inhabit shifting hierarchies of predator and prey, transforming the natural ecosystem into a psychological and social terrain. Kang’s use of beads, crystals, and sequins further complicates these themes: beneath their seductive brilliance lies a tension between beauty and danger, fragility and aggression. Ornament becomes both attraction and armor.

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A quiet encounter in Kang’s studio eventually shifted her understanding of survival. After removing a spider’s web, she later discovered that the spider had patiently rebuilt it. This small act of persistence redirected her attention from the struggle to survive toward the inherent value of life itself. Plants, roots, small organisms, and overlooked landscapes increasingly became subjects through which she could contemplate resilience, existence, and what she calls the “warmth of life.”

 

After Survival - Still & Life traces this transition from confrontation to contemplation. If Power Games emerged from the urgency of survival, Kang’s recent works turn toward stillness, observation, and the fragile beauty of ordinary existence. By separating Still from Life, the exhibition title transforms the familiar art-historical term into two states of being: to become still, and to remain alive.

This evolving concern also informs Kang’s newest body of work, provisionally titled Fossilized Nature, which responds to the disappearance of natural environments through climate change. Images of coral reefs, sea turtles, fish, flowers, and other vulnerable forms of life raise a larger question: What remains when the living world we take for granted begins to disappear? For Kang, observing and recording these fragile lives becomes an affirmation of their dignity and intrinsic value.

Ultimately, survival has not disappeared from Kang’s work; it has evolved into a heightened awareness of life’s fragility and value. After Survival - Still & Life follows this passage from surviving life to truly seeing it.

 

Joohyun Kang received her first MFA in Seoul and earned a second MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She lives and works in New York City.