2026 Democracy, Human Rights and Peace Exhibition [Kang Yo-bae: Embracing Time]

About the Exhibition

Held in Gwangju, the center of Korea's democratization movement, the 2026 Democracy, Human Rights and Peace Exhibition 《Kang Yobae: Embracing Time》 focuses on the time within Kang Yobae's work that captures absent time and connects it to the present. The exhibition shows how, beyond the landscape unfolding before our eyes, layers of accumulated time take shape within his paintings. This is a retrospective looking back on 50 years since Kang Yobae held his first solo exhibition in Jeju in 1976. It surveys his work from his early years, which metaphorically and symbolically unraveled a way of viewing reality within the artistic practice of the time, through pieces that embed the history and memory formed under division and the Cold War system into natural landscapes, to his recent work building landscapes of time condensed through the materiality of dry brushwork. 《Kang Yobae: Embracing Time》 follows the time the artist has confronted, offering an occasion to reflect on the time we live through and how we might remember and hold onto it.