In Transit, In Formation
On view: March 5 - April 18, 2026
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 4 (6-8 PM)
Tuesday - Friday: 10 AM - 6 PM / Saturday: 11 AM - 5 PM
Closed on Sunday and Monday
Venue: Korean Cultural Center New York
122 E 32nd Street, New York, NY, 10016 (1st & 2nd Floors)
This exhibition brings together four artists—Kakyoung Lee, Buhm Hong, Hong Seon Jang, and Sun You—whose practices unfold between movement and becoming. Transit functions as a condition of passage through time, labor, and cultural frameworks, while formation describes processes through which forms and identities take shape without closure. Working across sculpture, installation, animation, and video, the artists operate within these open-ended conditions, occupying a dual state: always en route, and at the same time, becoming something else.
These four artists share more than a generational proximity. Based in New York and shaped by contemporary Korean diasporic conditions, they have remained in ongoing dialogue for over a decade—observing one another’s practices, exchanging questions, and developing their work independently, yet in close awareness of one another. The exhibition emerges from a sustained familiarity, where distinct practices have evolved over time along parallel trajectories.
For Kakyoung Lee, movement is neither spectacle nor singular event, but a persistent rhythm of everyday life. Travel becomes a way of understanding how bodies move through the world—physically, emotionally, and socially. In multichannel animations such as Tourists, F Train, and the Palgongsan Series, these repeated motions accumulate into fragile records of lived experience. Here, identity is not something reached at the end of a journey, but something gradually formed through movement itself.
Buhm Hong approaches transit through memory and space, treating place not as a fixed location but as a constellation of memories that continually reconnect and reorganize. His video works construct imagined architectures from fragments of personal recollection, where spaces are summoned by light and woven into new relationships. In installations such as Memory Weeds, memory is no longer an individual narrative but a growing cluster, like a forest. These works remain in formation, where memory continues to expand over time rather than reaching completion.
In the work of Hong Seon Jang, movement takes on a distinctly structural form. Across Ship of Fools and Keys to the Moon and Back, materials are organized around two contrasting conditions of immigrant life—one grounded in the labor of survival, the other suspended in longing for what remains out of reach. One work gathers the debris and labor of everyday immigrant life; the other redirects that accumulation into an impossible vertical trajectory. Seen side by side, the installations ask what it means to build a life in motion within systems that simultaneously invite and withhold belonging.
Working at an intimate scale, Sun You centers her practice on restraint and proximity. Using small, lightweight materials—polymer clay, wire, magnets, beads, and found tools—she assembles provisional structures that subtly shift with each installation. Developed across multiple locations and sustained by gravity, chance, and delicate balance, her sculptures refuse monumentality, favoring intimacy and adaptability instead. Formation here is an ongoing stance grounded in impermanence, interdependence, and becoming.
Together, these practices articulate a shared condition—one in which movement does not seek arrival, and formation remains open, provisional, and ongoing.
About Artists
Kakyoung Lee
Kakyoung Lee is a Brooklyn-based artist with a background in printmaking. Her interdisciplinary practice centers on print, drawing, and time-based media to explore the invisible identities of Asian American and other marginalized communities. Lee has exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Queens Museum, MASS MoCA, Drawing Center, Kunsthalle Bremen, Seoul Arts Center, and ArtSpace C in Korea. She has participated in residencies such as Marie Walsh Sharpe, Yaddo, McDowell Colony, ISCP, Omi, and Brandywine Workshop. Her work has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, NYFA, and AHL Foundation. Lee’s work has been featured in Art in Paper, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, and Printeresting.com. Her prints and animations are held in public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Asia Society Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Jeju 4.3 Memorial in Jeju.
Buhm Hong
Buhm Hong was born in Seoul, Korea in 1970. He received a MFA for photography, video and related media at SVA. He had exhibitions to show installation work in places including San diego art institute, Doosan Gallery in New York. and Kum ho art museum in Seoul. He also participated in Jeju biennale and APMAP in Korea. His solo exhibitions was opened in art space ZIP of paradise foundation in Seoul, and Soso Gallery, Paju, Korea in recent, his works have been exhibited in Arco museum, Seoul and National museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Chung Ju.
Hong Seon Jang
Hong Seon Jang has widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions including The Korea Society, CR collective, TSA gallery, Wellin Museum of Art, NY; SHCM Museum of Art, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Meet Factory, Czech Republic; Fine Arts Gallery, San Francisco State University, CA; Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, NY; the Cohen Gallery at Brown University, RI; Smack Mellon, NY; McColl Center for Visual Art, NC; The Soap Factory, MN; The Islip Art Museum, NY; Artspace, CT; Rush Arts Gallery, NYC, and Hangaram Art Museum, South Korea. His awards and residencies include: ISCP residency, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, NY; Art Council Korea Grant, Korea; MSA, LA; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME; Tokyo Wonder Site, Artist-In-Residence, Japan; Percent for Art, Public School Art commission, NY; Djerassi, CA; Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL; Newark Museum, NJ; Lower East Side Printshop Special Editions Residency, NY; Emerging Artist Fellowship, Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Sculpture Space, NY; Bemis Art, NE; Abron Arts Center, NY; The Triangle Artists’ Workshop Program, NY; and Urban Artist Initiative Fellowship.
Sun You
Sun You is a Seoul born, New York based artist. You has exhibited her work in galleries and museums internationally. Selected exhibition venues include Geary, New York, G Gallery, Seoul, The Pit, Los Angeles, The Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul, Scotty Enterprise, Berlin, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia and The Suburban, Chicago. You was an artist in residence at Hunter College, Ace Hotel, Marble House Project, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Triangle Arts Association, Silver Art Projects, Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral and the Sharpe and Walentas Studio Program. You’s work has been featured in many publications including Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Korea Times, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters and Widewalls. You’s artist book, ‘please enjoy!’ was published by Small Editions and acquired by the Whitney Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University and New York Public Library. You heads President Clinton Projects, a curatorial project and co-runs a non-profit gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York. She teaches as an assistant professor at Lafayette College.
