This exhibition presents a durational video performance made in the former studio of the late American painter Elizabeth Murray. Inspired by the acclaimed artist’s workspace in Washington County, New York, Kang’s improvisational and playful performance explores studio practice as a daily ritual. Kang’s work reactivates and reinterprets Murray’s studio through the lens of an artist of a new generation, drawing out ideas of absence and presence, distance and intimacy, materiality and spirituality.

Two years ago, during my time in the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency program, I had the unique opportunity to use Murray’s dairy barn-turned-studio located on the upstate farm where she split her time for over two decades of her life. As I touched the objects that were once held by Murray, brushing my hand gently over the walls and walking barefoot across the wooden floor, I was deeply moved and inspired by the space. The history of the accumulated paint strokes on the walls and the palpable sense of Murray’s creative energy in the air compelled me to build an intimate relationship with the studio, hoping that in doing so I might forge a spiritual connection with the artist herself.

I developed my own studio practice within the context of her studio. I set up my camera in a fixed position in the middle of the space and recorded my daily practice for 28 days. Using my body as a medium through which to channel and revive Murray’s studio, I gradually developed a choreography of intuitive actions and movements repeated over the course of each day. I observed and examined the space, animated Murray’s studio objects through interaction, and created a series of gestures and watercolor drawings that mirror the smudges and traces left on her studio walls.

Upon entering Kang’s exhibition, viewers are immediately immersed within the soundtrack of Murray’s studio: a chorus of chirping birds, her paint-speckled ladder rolling across the barn floor, the pitter-patter of rain. During her filmed performance, projected within the gallery space, Kang recites fragments of underlined text from Murray’s personal art book collection coupled with an intimate, anonymous handwritten poem Kang found in Murray’s home library.

The studio acts as the nexus between Murray and Kang—two artists from different times, cultures, and artistic backgrounds, who nonetheless both found profound inspiration in the same space. Murray left traces of herself in her studio, and Kang, in turn, takes them for a score, embodying these remnants of Murray’s creative activity in order to give them new life.

This project was made possible by the 2019 Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency program by Collar Works.