3 × 3-inch canvases While a student at Pratt Institute, Kang had worked twelve hours a day between a grocery store in Manhattan and a
flea market in
Far Rockaway, Queens. The three-hour commute of subway riding and walking evolved into his time and place to make art, as Kang figured 3-square-inched sized canvases easily fit into his pocket as well as the palm of his hand. On such canvases, Kang painted, drew, wrote, sewed, and attached clay, metal, rice, and plastic, among other found objects collected amongst the city's discarded materials, developing a multimedia practice. would be hung into a grid formation. Kang stated that his adoption of the grid formation has come from observing the tiled walls of New York City's subway platforms, which alluded to a strong sense of space and time, and also referred to the structure of Japanese
Shoji as another source of inspiration, for it contains several small squares within a larger one, offering a person both a limited and vast amount of space. While the large-scale mosaic-like installations, often presented as public art, persisted as the artist's dominant style, Kang also developed his oeuvre by transforming his daily practice of making the canvases into "living" performances for which he would make paintings continuously for the duration of a show (
One Month Living Performance, Two Two Raw Gallery, New York, NY, 1986), or translating them into a series of woodcuts (1991). While Kang was not part of the founding members of Godzilla, he maintained close ties with many deeply involved. Kang had been exposed to and engaged with projects of the time that responded to racial inequalities nonetheless and participated in a number of shows curated by Asian American curators and art organizations, such as the
Asian American Arts Centre. In 1990, Kang was among those coordinating the exhibition
The Mosaic of the City: Artists Against Racial Prejudice held at the Skylight Gallery of the Center for Arts and Culture of Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. signaling to the time's intraracial conflict between Korean American and African American communities that surfaced with the
Family Red Apple boycott. Through the exhibition, the artists aimed to "create an open forum where issues of racial prejudice can be addressed". were Korean American artists Ik-Joong Kang,
Mo Bahc,
Sung Ho Choi, Taeho Lee, Yeong Gill Kim,
Kwangsung Lee, Oh Chi-Gyun, Hoyoon Choi, and William Jung.
Nam June Paik The Korean-American video artist
Nam June Paik has been cited as an influential and significant figure to Kang, especially for their shared approach and system to art-making: employing modular units to build up a larger whole, which both artists likened to
bibimbap, a Korean dish that mixes rice with whatever is at hand. For the latter exhibition, titled
Multiple/Dialogue ∞, Kang presented the work
Samramansang ("all things in nature", 삼라만상, 2009), which presented approximately 62,000 of his 3 x 3 inch canvases installed around a 200-meter-long spiral wall. The work was to surround Paik's
Dadaiksun ("more the better", 다다익선, 1988), a highlighted work of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's collection, which was commissioned to and built using 1,003 televisions by Paik to celebrate
1988 Summer Olympics held by Korea. 34,000 drawings by children from 135 countries were solicited for
Amazed World (2001), a commission from the United Nations, and 126,000 drawings by children from 141 countries for
Moon of Dream (2004), a commission by
World Culture Open. By 2004, Kang's approach to the series evolved to involve not only drawings but also objects. For the opening of the new building of
Princeton Public Library, NJ, Kang assembled a mural titled
Happy World (2004). Among its consisting 2,700 3 x 3-inch tiles were about 1,000 tiles that incorporated meaningful artifacts donated by the Princeton community, including "a deck of playing cards owned by Albert Einstein, pieces of the Berlin Wall, and a 1909 Free Public Library notice, along with everyday items such as a sports equipment, a parking meter, and family photos."
50,000 Windows, A Future Wall (2008) for Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art is another large-scale mural that incorporates drawings by children, collected objects, as well as the artist's own drawings and writing on 3 x 3-inch tiles.
Ik-Joong Kang Typeface, 2001– While Kang's own handwriting–both in Korean and English–had been incorporated from early in his career, in 2001, Kang began to put forth a series of works in which a single 3 x 3-inch canvas bore one syllable in
hangul, the Korean alphabet. Each syllable was written and drawn with "crapas", a children-friendly type of crayon. Using its dozen colors, Kang distinguished between the syllable's consonant and vowel letters that highlighted hangul's modular system of construction. This design has become known as the Ik-Joong Kang Typeface (강익중체, ''kangikchungch'e
). The artist further produced hangul letters that can better notate English pronunciations, such as the f, r, th, v, and z consonants. The many syllables and canvases put together made sentences in Korean, offering simple factoids and points of wisdom the artist claims to "know" or has learned from life. The series, titled Things I Know'', developed from offering a single sentence to multiple, developing into and presented as prose poetry. The series was featured as a large-scale installation in the Korean Pavilion for
Expo 2010 Shanghai China and also developed as a participatory work that incorporated sentences received from the general public for the artist's solo show at Arko Art Center, Seoul, in 2017. The facade consisted of 2,611 wooden panels painted with images of the moon jar and
Inwangsan, the mountain behind Gwanghwamun and
Gyeongbokgung Palace, as well as 5,200 drawings by children from around the globe. Titled
Gwanghwamun Arirang, the work in cube format was composed of 12,000 3 x 3-inch drawings by children from the 23 nations that supported South Korea during the Korean War, their silhouette shaped into a large moon jar. Surrounding the moon jar were the artist's hangul letter drawings spelling out the lyrics to the Korean folk song
Arirang as well as the names of 175,801 fallen soldiers of the Korean War.
Gwanghwamun Arirang was a kinetic sculpture, its top half in slow rotation. == References ==