Everyday People features the people who make the greater Ingleside neighborhood a special part of San Francisco.
Michael Hyun Gu Kang opened his garage door to the world for SF Open Studios over the weekend. The garage-turned-art-studio was lined with paint canisters, graffiti and works that, for Kang, evoke memories of emotions stronger than any photograph ever could.
Sixteen years ago, Kang, 35, moved to San Francisco to attend California College of the Arts and never left. For years, he worked odd jobs until he could support himself through his art practice. Kang and his wife have been in Ingleside for the last six years with their year-and-a-half-old son and dog.
Propped up against the back wall is one of Kang’s larger, more profound paintings, the first he’s been able to complete since his son was born. His frenetic and emotional style captures the budding family in their kitchen, in the midst of what Kang described as a tumultuous time.
“It’s been a big transition,” Kang said. “I took a photo of us in the kitchen when we were just so beat down. I'm pouring myself cold coffee, my baby is crawling all over me and you can make out [my dog] standing behind the baby gate. I just felt, as tired and worn down as we were, this is the place where we’re making our family.”
The title of the painting is “The Field Where Our Love Grows,” a tribute to the intimate familial disarray of life with a newborn.
Remi, a Taiwanese Formosan mountain dog, in the studio. | John R. Adkins/Ingleside Light
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What kind of headspace do you need to be in to create these kinds of paintings?
When I'm painting consistently, I always seem to exist in that headspace. Even when I'm not painting, I'm thinking about it. I wake up thinking about it, and I go to sleep thinking about it. And I get this momentum going. That’s why “The Field Where Our Love Grows” was so hard for me. Because I had just been watching my son for so long and it put me in this weird headspace where I didn't trust the decisions I was making in my painting.
So, when I get to that place, I just try to make stuff. It doesn't matter what it is, good or bad. I just start making stuff without thinking about it. And that's what a lot of this stuff is on the wall. For example, the first thing I made when I started painting was when I took these vases my friend made for me and thought, "I'm just going to stick these on a canvas with globs of paint."
How did you discover this style of using acrylic paint like glue? What’s your approach?
I’ve been doing it for a long time. For example, I have these glass-pressed pieces. The only thing holding these panes of glass in place is a few dots of paint. When I first started painting all the time, I was thinking about this in-between space of digital and analog, and this idea of hyper realism. People often think of photography as hyperreal, but it’s actually very abstracted. I felt like putting the glass down, and re-flattening the painting, but also bridging the gap to the digital to make it a screen.
These days, I think less about the digital and analog and more about the layer and effect that it can create. In an ideal world, I would shove a piece of glass over "The Field Where Our Love Grows" and re-flatten the whole thing. It adds depth, like you're creating these physical and metaphorical windows.
"The Field Where Our Love Grows," by Michael Hyun Gu Kang. | John R. Adkins/Ingleside Light
If you were to look at your own work, is there a theme that all your pieces carry, or something that could tie them all together?
A lot of it is melancholy, as well as existing in a kind of a middle space. I've always tried to capture that. I think I capture anxiety a lot. So figures in motion, figures stagnating, but always in transition.
I've been painting a lot of these hands with flowers. One thing I was thinking about was how flowers represent celebration, mourning, passing, and rebirth. And the older I get, the more I've been going to baby showers, funerals, weddings. So when I found out my wife was pregnant, I started painting all these hands with the flowers, and to me, it represents this overwhelming part of life. So, there are a lot of hands, but you just can't grasp everything.
So would you say Ingleside is a bit of an extension of that field where the love grows?
Absolutely. I mean, this is where we are. It's funny because since we moved here, it's been so foggy. So we buy flowers all the time to fill our house and give us that reminder of the sun.
But I love this neighborhood and I love my neighbors. This is home for sure. Immediately when I first moved here, I thought, “Oh, this is like a little mini Chinatown.” I’m Korean, but it was comforting to find a culturally diverse neighborhood. It’s probably the most convenient and friendly neighborhood I’ve lived in since moving to the bay.
“The Lab” (left) is a diptych of me painting and drawing at a table, sitting down. “Too little too late,” (right) is his rendition of the early 19th-century painting, “The Raft of the Medusa. | John R. Adkins/Ingleside Light
What do you hope to achieve with your paintings?
I want to look back at some of the paintings and feel like, “What were you thinking when you were making that?” Or, were you thinking? To go back to that idea of how a photo can be abstract and distort our memory of things, when I look back at this painting, I know exactly how I felt at this time. When I made this, or when I shoved those pots on that, to me, that's a more realistic memory than a photo.
John R. Adkins is a San Francisco-based journalist and storyteller living in Ingleside. He is editor-in-chief of City College's student-run publication The Guardsman and reports on higher education, politics and the arts.
