Transient

Pipe Gallery is pleased to present 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵, a two-person exhibition by Myungchan Kim (b.1992) and Sojeong Yang (b.1979), on view from June 2 to July 1. Meaning “temporary” or “briefly lingering,” the exhibition title emerges from the artists’ shared attention to unstable forms, fleeting sensations, and traces of vanishing presence. Yet the act of “holding” proposed here is far removed from any desire for permanent preservation. Rather, it allows transient forms and sensations on the verge of disappearance a provisional place to remain, attending to the brief interval that passes between emergence and dissolution.

Painting has long been understood as a medium that arrests time through the hardening of pigment and the fixation of surface. Images appear detached from temporal flow, remaining as if suspended in a single fixed moment. In the works of Myungchan Kim and Sojeong Yang, however, painting moves in the opposite direction. For both artists, painting is not a means of permanently possessing or stabilizing something, but a provisional site that renders perceptible the fleeting interval between disappearance and formation. Through processes of slowness, sustained attention, hesitation, and capture, their works allow unstable forms and traces to linger momentarily, functioning as spaces that temporarily hold the contours of what is fading away.

Myungchan Kim investigates the sensations and tensions arising between the human body, mechanical media, and materiality through painting. Centering on the relationships among humans, technology, and images, his work seeks to retain traces of sensation and presence that are easily lost within the speed- and efficiency-driven conditions of contemporary society. Drawing from photographic imagery, he reconstructs human figures, transforming repeatedly appearing subjects from mere representations into vehicles that convey sensory vibration and emotional resonance. Low-saturation color fields, subtly wavering lines, and the tension between chance and control generated within limited tools produce a temporal density of hesitation across the surface, while industrial materials such as steel, aluminum, and wood function as physical devices in which corporeality and mechanization collide. The traces left upon metal surfaces resemble not fixed images but fleeting states in which sensation momentarily lingers before disappearing. For the artist, painting operates as a physical event that reveals the processes through which sensation emerges and dissolves, while also exploring the continuing possibility of embodied experience within the contemporary image environment.

In this exhibition in particular, the artist focuses not on fully covering the surface to complete an image, but on partially leaving and exposing it. By sanding the surface to reveal the material properties of aluminum and incorporating both the mechanical spray of the airbrush and the physical friction of sanding into the work itself, his paintings expand beyond finished images into sites that expose the conditions of image production and the traces of sensation. Still-life motifs such as armor, dried pollack heads, crabs, and chrysanthemums appear not as simple representations in the tradition of still-life painting, but as subjects that reveal how contemporary bodies and sensations are filtered and retained under mechanical conditions.

Sojeong Yang has consistently explored forms in the process of disappearance and the moments of their transformation as central concerns of painting. Drawing from autobiographical experiences and images collected from everyday life, she attends to the contours of objects moving toward dissolution, including dried plants, smoke, ice, and broken water. What matters in her work is not the fixed meaning or narrative of an object, but the sensory traces of forms revealed at the threshold of disappearance. These forms are treated less as stable entities than as fluid presences drifting between emergence and extinction, which the artist temporarily records upon the pictorial plane. In particular, the notion of the “closed curve” functions as a key concept linking surface and space, body and image. Her understanding of the body as “the largest closed curve” expands the contour from a mere outline into a boundary that temporarily shelters existence and sensation.

Yang further likens the act of drawing to fishing, understanding the process of capturing and pulling forth images as a painterly event in itself. Her installation-based experiments—cutting out images from paper, combining them with wooden supports, and moving between two- and three-dimensional forms—reveal the ways images are generated and displaced within space. In this way, her practice extends painting beyond a flat surface of representation into a relational structure among material, space, image, and body. Ultimately, Sojeong Yang’s paintings may be understood as a quiet yet persistent practice that grants fading things a temporary place to remain, inviting viewers to reconsider the archetypal forms and traces of sensation that often pass unnoticed.