ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL is pleased to present KANG Cheolgyu (b. 1990)’s solo exhibition Discarded Host, on view from May 1 (Fri) to Jun 20 (Sat), 2026. KANG Cheolgyu has continuously developed a practice that transforms reality into a fictional pictorial world, beginning from psychological sensations arising from personal experience and the inner self. Rather than directly representing events, he focuses on the moment when emotion and memory take shape as images, constructing psychological scenes on the pictorial surface where anxiety, tension, and unfamiliar sensations linger. This practice unfolds through confronting the self by projecting it onto figures and narratives situated within an external fictional world, accumulating the processes of inner transformation as a painterly narrative.

Presented across the first floor and basement level of ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL, this exhibition consists of 27 new paintings and unfolds around a shift in perception evident in KANG’s recent work. These works begin from an understanding of the self not as a fixed entity, but as a fluid structure formed through the overlapping of perception and sensation, emotion and memory. Tracing how this shift manifests through changes in painterly iconography, the exhibition reveals that images previously appearing in forms of division and cohesion, distortion and persistence are not signs of internal defect, but traces of multiple perceptions operating in parallel.

Discarded Host is an exhibition that departs from conventional understandings of the self as a fixed center, exploring instead the plural structure of sensation and perception through which existence is constituted. The exhibition approaches the self not as a singular entity, but as a fluid state in which anxiety and impulse, memory and emotion operate in parallel, attending to a new sensory order that emerges after the dissolution of a center. The “host” is proposed as a site through which diverse sensations and impulses pass and linger, while the condition of being “discarded” is understood not as loss, but as the possibility of another condition of existence. At the same time, through a painterly world that moves across the boundary between reality and fiction, the exhibition reveals unknown layers of the real and psychological landscapes, while exploring ways of sensing changing existence amid the generation of uncontrolled images and persistent tensions. Ultimately, Discarded Host asks what becomes possible after the loss of a center, inviting reflection on the uncertainty of plural sensation and existence within the space of painting.

KANG Cheolgyu’s practice has developed as a painterly inquiry grounded in personal psychological experience and ontological questions, exploring the process by which inner sensations such as anxiety, tension, self-doubt, and threat take shape as images. Rather than representing emotion or explaining it through narrative, his work captures the moment when psychological states condense into distorted forms, monstrous beings, unfamiliar landscapes, and scenes of confrontation and menace. Within his paintings, reality and fiction, representation and fantasy do not remain separate but intersect, while fictional images function not as imaginations detached from reality, but as a means of revealing another layer of the real that resists direct perception. Recent works move away from narratives of a unified or resilient subject, foregrounding instead structures of division, parallel perception, and the instability and endurance of existence. In doing so, they expand painting not as a medium for emotional resolution, but as a psychological landscape in which questions and tensions persist, and as a site for exploring existence itself. Particularly notable in these recent works are the generation of uncontrolled images, a painterly attitude that embraces chance and error, and an engagement with multilayered structures of consciousness that resist organization around a single center.

A Chain of Questions and the Unstable Self

KANG’s practice has long begun with an inquiry into what constitutes the existence of the self. Yet this examination extends beyond a simple exploration of identity toward a more fundamental consideration: whether the self can exist as a singular center at all. In his work, such questions do not move toward resolution, but recur through self-doubt and self-scrutiny in an ongoing chain, and this repetition itself has functioned as the structure of thought driving the work. In his earlier works, the self has functioned as a central force sustaining the inner world, and figures engaged in resistance and struggle emerged as extensions of that condition. Yet unexplained physical pain, persistent anxiety, and recurring doubt gradually made it difficult to sustain the notion of the self as a singular entity. What had once been understood as a coherent self begins instead to appear fractured and mutable – a shifting structure in which multiple sensations, impulses and states operate in parallel. The Ankleless (2025) and Feverish (2025) mark the beginning of this shift in perception. These works engage anger and helplessness arising from pain, as well as the disjunction between sensation and proof, unsettling the very grounds of reality itself. Subsequent works such as Epiphany (2026) and Vomit (2025) move beyond pain as subject matter toward broader questions on reality and fiction, self and illusion, revealing an awareness that the self may not be a stable entity but a kind of phantom. Within this process, the host emerges as a key concept running throughout the exhibition. No longer conceived as a vessel inhabited by the self, the host appears instead as a bodily site where diverse sensations, impulses, memories, and emotions converge and contend. Discarded Host (2026) and Anagnorisis (2026) address the fracture of a central self and the conditions of existence that follow from it. Here, the work moves beyond articulating a singular subject, expanding into a painterly practice that asks what other modes of existence might emerge when the center begins to waver.

Anger, Threat, and a Painterly World of Reality and Fiction

The monstrous beings, strange forms, and overwhelming landscapes that appear in KANG’s paintings are less products of fictional imagination than manifestations of realities sensed as they take form. His images do not seek to explain specific symbols; rather, they operate as events through which anxiety, tension, anger, and threat emerge. Particularly significant in his recent work is the shift in structures of antagonism, from confrontations with the external world to conflicts internal to the self. Antagonist (2026) reveals that hostility is not only directed toward an external other, but may also constitute an internal condition. Consciousness Grass (2026) presents a scene in which different states of consciousness arise together, suggesting that the self is not a singular center but an assemblage in which multiple sensations and impulses coexist. The proliferating forms across the pictorial surface disclose a flow of consciousness that resists integration, while simultaneously generating a state of tension through which such multiplicity is perceived and endured. By contrast, Mowing (2026) addresses the impulse to organize or eliminate these multiple states of consciousness. Yet such elimination does not lead to complete erasure, but instead returns through repetition and recurrence, revealing a condition in which control and dissolution occur simultaneously. Together, these works present the self not as a fixed entity, but as a process in which different states of consciousness are generated, collide, and are continually negotiated.

Within KANG’s paintings, emotions are not resolved, threats are not eliminated, and the self is never fully integrated. Instead, they disperse, fade, and intensify again, remaining suspended across the pictorial surface. Painting functions not by offering resolution, but as a site where tension and inquiry persist. In this context, the recent works can be understood not as depicting the collapse of the self, but as exploring how existence might be reconstituted after the destabilization of a center. Central to these works are sensations operating in parallel, the generation of unruly images, and a mode of thought that endures uncertainty and tension. Ultimately, they ask what becomes possible after an abandoned center, while revealing this inquiry does not arrive at an easy conclusion. This shift unfolds in more complex form in Shadows in the Core (2026). Headless figures, floating faces, and bodies transformed into rocky cliffs are juxtaposed, visualizing not a singular self but multiple states of consciousness. Here, the “shadows” function as ghostly traces of a central self, believed to have disappeared yet still lingering within the image and returning in repeated form. The work reveals latent human figures embedded within symbolic iconography, suggesting that traces of the self can never be fully erased from the center of the image. Even as the central self is recognized as an illusion and subjected to dissolution, a desire to refigure it in human form continues to persist. This tension marks a point at which an awareness seeking to accept fragmentation coexists with a countervailing impulse to transform its residue into a generative force of expression. That contradiction itself functions as a central mode of expression within the work.

Exploring Existence through Painting and the Expansion of Psychological Landscape

Amid these shifts in perception, The Refusal of Pan (2026) reworks scenes where desire, refusal, and anxiety intersect through transformed imagery, drawing on the recurring figures of Pan—the half-human, half-goat figure from Greek mythology—and the mermaid from European myth, both of which have appeared repeatedly in KANG’s earlier works. The Snare (2026) constructs a pictorial field in which tension and anxiety accumulate through symbolic imagery recurring in German medieval painting alongside serpentine forms. Still-Portrait (2026), grounded in the tradition of classical still-life painting, crosses the boundary between still life and self-portraiture, revealing a structure composed not of a fixed self but of multiple overlapping images. Taken together, these works should be understood not as a break from earlier practice, but as points at which different visual languages continue, transform, and generate themselves through an evolving process of shifting self-perception. 

For KANG, painting is not a vehicle for emotional expression but a site of practice through which existence is explored. His work is less concerned with problem-solving or emotional release than with sustaining a condition in which questions and sensations persist, accumulating thought through that ongoing state. Accidental forms arising from the layered surface of the painting and from failures of representation are all embraced as constitutive elements of the work. This attitude extends beyond a self-centered narrative toward a painterly methodology in which multiple states of consciousness operate simultaneously. An Offering for the New (2026) actively incorporates traces of painterly failure and revision. Marks generated through failed intentions and corrective processes are transformed not into defects but into conditions for image-making, absorbed into the work and functioning as forces that construct form. In this process, colliding sensations and the unintentional generation of images emerge at once. In this way, his paintings blur the boundary between reality and fiction, forming new psychological landscapes through the layering and intersection of images.

Venue
ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (85 Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea) B1F, 1F

Artists
KANG Cheolgyu

Exhibition Dates
1 May -20 Jun 2026 

Website
https://www.arariogallery.com/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/arariogallery/

Contact
info@arariogallery.com

About Artist

KANG Cheolgyu was born in Gimcheon, Korea, in 1990. He received his BFA in Painting from Hannam University in 2015 and his MFA in Fine Arts from the Graduate School of Hannam University in 2019. He has held solo exhibitions at Gallery IN HQ (Seoul, Korea, 2024), Chapter II (Seoul, Korea, 2022), M2 Project Room, Lee Ungno Museum (Daejeon, Korea, 2021), Daejeon Temi Art Center (Daejeon, Korea, 2020), and Gallery Gabi (Seoul, Korea, 2018). He has participated in group exhibitions at Museumhead (Seoul, Korea, 2025), Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2025), Schema Art Museum (Cheongju, Korea, 2024), Daejeon Museum of Art (Daejeon, Korea, 2024, 2021, 2018), WWNN (Seoul, Korea, 2024), ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2024), Gallery Baton (Seoul, Korea, 2022), and Sejong Center Gwanghwarang Gallery (Seoul, Korea, 2015), among others. He was an artist-in-residence at Daejeon Temi Art Center (Daejeon, Korea) in 2020 and at White Block Cheonan Art Village (Cheonan, Korea) in 2023. KANG was selected as a Kumho Young Artist in 2024. His works are held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Government Art Bank, Seoul Museum of Art, Daejeon Museum of Art, and the ARARIO Collection.

(Text and images courtesy of KANG Cheolgyu)