Hyunhee Doh and Zhong Kangjun’s Dual Narratives of Being through Paper

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When discarded newspapers meet hanji (Korean mulberry paper), and labor memories collide with philosophical inquiry, an experiment in the dialectics of "paper as life" unfolds at EY PROJECTS. Hyunhee Doh (b.1996, Busan, South Korea) and Zhong Kangjun (b.1984, Zhanjiang, China) present the joint exhibition Fleeting and Enduring, using paper as a shared starting point to forge two divergent creative paths—the former interrogating existential temporality through dissolution, the latter reconstructing historical weight through weaving.

 

Hyunhee Doh’s practice emerges from self-inquiry within globalized and digitalized contexts. Working across Korea, the US, and the UK, she transforms hanji into an experimental field, engaging in a philosophical ritual of "wet-dry" and "paint-wash/off" cycles with water-soluble mineral pigments and graphite. Her process unfolds as a meticulously choreographed sequence of verbs:

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Paint - Wash-off - Draw - Smudge - Paint - Wash-off - Paint - Wash-off - Wash-off - Paint - Draw - Draw - Draw - Wash-off - Paint - Paint - Paint – Smudge - Wash-off - Paint - Wash-off

 

This seemingly endless repetition constitutes a deliberate "chronographic development." The hanji becomes a hypersensitive spatiotemporal recorder: each water-induced wrinkle, every residual trace of pigment permeation and erosion, forms micro-topographies akin to geological movements. As the artist states, "Whenever hanji absorbs moisture, its transparency and unstable colors reveal latent traces that resonate deeply with my creative process." The coexistence of indelible "memory sediments" and voluntarily vanishing "ephemeral imprints" constructs an unstable cartography of individual existence—time simultaneously solidifies and dissolves through layered transparencies, each interweaving stratum posing silent questions about the constitution of selfhood.

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In counterpoint stands Chinese artist Zhong Kangjun’s practice. Born into a family of rural artisans in Zhanjiang, Guangdong (his father a bricklayer, his mother a bamboo weaver), he deconstructs urban detritus—newspapers and magazines—into dense "information fibers." Using indelible ballpoint pens and vinyl paint and cutting paper into long strips, he reconstructs chaotic visual terrains through tens of thousands of repetitive weaving gestures. Crushed political symbols, historical fragments, and vernacular texts shed their specific significations within jagged hand-pixelated grids, fossilizing into strata of collective memory. His work embodies both labor poetics—each warp-and-weft thread transposing ancestral craftsmanship into contemporary syntax—and archaeological semantics, deconstructing original information to weave new geological layers that reassemble life narratives fragmented by modernity.

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Dialogues in Temporal Folds

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Their collision reveals paper’s dual potential: Zhong Kangjun solidifies the weight of collective memory, transmuting newsprint’s temporality into eternal cultural stratigraphy; Hyunhee Doh recreates the individual existence in a timely perspective, capturing fluid and ephemeral identities within hanji’s creases. Zhong’s weaving labor burns like an archaeological bonfire in the information wasteland, salvaging forgotten meaning-fossils; Doh’s hanji theater acts as a prism for liquid modernity, refracting viewers’ mirrored struggles with time in an age of flux. Measuring time through antithetical units—Zhong via the "warp-weft" of historical depth, Doh through the "painting-washing/off" of existential traces—they collectively challenge conventional temporal narratives, constructing within paper’s spacetime an eternal dialectic of remembrance/oblivion and solidification/dissolution.