Chris Kang

Chris Kang is a Chicago-based artist focused on figurative and surrealist painting and drawing, along with sculptural and digital illustration. They are currently pursuing a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and expect to graduate in 2026.

 

In a deadline oriented world, drawing grants people time to submit to the urges for repetition, fixation, and reworking. Kang's work is deeply intertwined with her adolescent experiences of falling behind in school and requiring intensive treatment due to debilitating overthinking and an inability to complete tasks without attempting to rework every aspect. Her practice explores these obsessions through intensive mark making, rubbing, erasing, and layering to force into fragile paper and canvas a memory of "past lives" - the faint lines, scratches, tears and wrinkles of prior sketches that cannot be fully erased.