Wrecker-the Bolt by Dmitri Shostakovich-Series I, 2025

Sanghoon Kang  

To me, music is both an inevitable encounter and a vital compass in life. 

As a lifelong cellist raised in a musical family in Korea, music has become a fundamental part of my identity, woven into my life by both passion and obligation. Though I did not pursue the path of a cellist, I was drawn to fields such as engineering and architecture, disciplines that intertwine art, logic, and imagination. I completed my undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering in the U.S., went on to pursue graduate studies in architecture in the U.S., and earned doctoral degree in architectural history in France. 

After a long and winding journey, I worked as an architect, taught architectural history in universities in Korea, and art gallery director in France, moving between cultures while constantly searching for an artistic language through which I could communicate with my own inner world. During my years in Paris, France, directing an art gallery, my long friendships and collaborations with artists from around the world deepened my desire to realize my own artistic vision. Eventually, upon leaving France and settling in Canada, I began a new chapter as a visual artist, a painter. 

While studying architecture, I encountered Goethe and Schelling's evocative notion that “architecture is frozen music." The idea fascinated and inspired me to connect the three threads that have shaped my life, music, architecture, and painting, into a single expressive form. 

Listening to music, I try to perceive the movement of notes and visualize their inner structure, exploring it through a scientific lens. By enumerating, separating, juxtaposing, and merging various geometric forms, combining them with diverse color harmonies, I create my own “play" of structure and sound, imagining the shape of “frozen music." Through these , I strive to express the stories of humanity, nature, culture, and the spirit of nations within a single on canvas. 

For me, painting is a precious way to share moments of peace, blessing, and joy that art brings, and to participate in the world through them. Many viewers from around the world have said that they could almost “hear" the music in my paintings. When we talk about the aesthetic beauty within these musical images, I feel that they, too, are sharing in the same mysterious world that art creates. 

My artwork has been exhibited and introduced through solo and group shows and art fairs in France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Korea, and Japan. I am currently focused on researching 21st-century music and painting.