‘The Joy of Making’, Thomas Kong’s Work
By Cole Hersey
Being a kid we’re often just handed paper and pens, sometimes scissors and glue and told to go out and make stuff. We don’t know that there can be any sort of purpose in it, beyond just the joy of making it. The making of it is the purpose—to try to create something that we find beautiful, or good, or fun, and captivates ourselves.
The new group show, Chicago at Casemore Gallery at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, is a testament to the joy of creating, highlighting the collage work of the late Chicago-based artist Thomas Kong. The other works grapple with disjointed identities and the experience of immigrating to the United States, using their own form of collage work, appearing almost to create their works as an homage to the obsessively prolific life and work of Kong.
Originally planned out to be a solo show, following complications due to Leukemia, Kong, an immigrant originally from North Korea, passed away in May of 2023. With his passing they brought on other artists from the Chicago area such as Ed Oh, Sungho Bae, Efrat Hakimi, and Guanyu Xu.
All the work in some way speaks to varied forms of alienation, cooptation, and identity as it relates to their experience of living as an immigrant, with a key emphasis visually in collage work. Efrat Hakimi’s piece “Flora,” for instance, was a wall of fake pressed flowers with their Arabic, Hebrew, and English names written beside them as a reflection of how Zionists use language to strip culture from a place (if you’re curious to learn more about the piece and her history, she wrote a great essay about it on her website here).
Guanyu Xu’s piece “Resident Aliens” is a photo collage of different immigrant interiors stitched together and showing their personal photos to confuse the lines between “familiar and foreignness.”
And while the other artist’s work is captivating in its own way, the show is flooded with cardboard, plastic bags, and odd-shaped pieces of paper by Thomas Kong. The show, really, is an honor to Kong and his life.
Born in 1950 just before the Korean War, Kong and his family of five sisters and their mother fled the country shortly after his father was captured and killed by North Korean forces. Eventually, they made their way to Seoul, where Kong studied English literature and eventually moved to the Midwest. There he had many odd jobs, eventually starting a couple of businesses, such as a shoe repair shop. In 2006 he bought a small corner store called Kim’s Convenience Store.
According to his obituary in the Chicago Tribune, he looked at all the empty walls, the bright fluorescent lights, and hated it. It depressed him. So, grabbing bits of scraps from the piles of cardboard he had laying around the shop, he started cutting abstracted shapes and gluing them on top of cardboard, or taking empty bottles and making spyres out of them. He put everything up in the store just to make it a little more beautiful a place to be. Eventually, people in the Chicago art world noticed his wild shop and he became a local icon.
“Any artist that walked into his store could see that it was his studio,” Jennifer Keats, a Chicago-based artist said of Kim’s Convenience to Book Club Chicago last year, “It showed that there are so many alternative models for making.”
Eventually, S.Y. Lim of the Chicago gallery, 062, met him and helped him get into shows. From there his work started to be shown all over the world. However, he would rarely attend these openings, settling instead to continue working the store as he did,12 hours-a-day, seven days a week, until his passing last year.
Now, you can see some of the thousands of collages Kong made while he worked his store, flooding the walls, in a playful manner that is so easily lost in the art world today, where meaning can at times supersede composition, style, and just the joy of making.
In the back corner at Casemore, you can slip into a small room covered like the rest in Kong’s work, but with a small putty-colored convenience store shelf in the middle, empty save a few rolls of toilet paper on the bottom. The shelf looks so sad and desolate, but the works surrounding it, just cardboard and colorful packing material, is vibrant, so lively against the quiet white walls.
The exhibition is open until November 9th.
Chicago: Thomas Kong, Ed Oh, Sungho Bae, Efrat Hakimi and Guanyu Xu
September 28 — Novermber 9, 2024
Casemore Gallery
hours: Tues-Saturday 11-5
1275 Minnesota Street, #102
San Francisco
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