In computing, file system fragmentation, sometimes called file system ageing, is the tendency of a file system to lay out the contents of files non continuously to allow in-place modification of their contents. It is a special case of data fragmentation. File system fragmentation negatively impacts seek time in spinning storage media, which is known to hinder throughput. Fragmentation can be remedied by re organising files and free space back into contiguous areas, a process called defragmentation.

(Wikipedia)1

Vividly coloured and presented as almost abstract shapes and forms, tracing lines or colour fields into spaces that most of time misleads more than help their interpretation, the paintings by Naeun Kang are all figurative and all very thoroughly depicting traces and images in which close to nothing is random or unthought of. In one of these paintings, for example, a room is presented to us, not in the classic pictorial idea of a room, but as a planimetry. We need to specify that it is not a random room that is presented to us, as this is the living room of the artist’s parents at their home in South Korea. The planimetry represents almost exactly Kang’s memory of this place: the furniture, a table arranged with plates, a kitchen, and even the movements of the people in this represented landscape are depicted by round circles moving through the space. This room exists and none of these movements were invented, the remote village where they live close to where the artist has grown up exists, as much as the complex relation between these people that are depicted sitting at this table.

Also the teeth in another painting exists, they are the teeth that were under scrutiny when the artist’s dentist, her family’s dentist in South Korea, decided to bring up how he thought that Kang should have been visiting more often her family, the father and mother and brother depicted by the circles and sitting at the table in her planimetry, whose relations with the artist has become symbolised by these teeth paintings, with their cavities and complex interactions. These relations exist as much as the keys and the baggage the artist depicted in other two works included in this show. Like fragments and bits and pieces, these works are a constellation of instants and thoughts, of feelings and images that at first glance compose together a picture not far from the coloured and abstract screen that everybody that owned a computer in the 90es and early 00s have been presented with, the lines of untidy squares and colour bits with which our operative systems showed us how much our laptop needed defragmentation, in lingo Defrag. A process of turning a spread-out reality into a more organised form, a more efficient way of seeing and retrieving information from a complex system of data. In the same way, Naeun Kang presents us with maybe her most complex exhibition to date, where different series meet and invite the viewer to follow them in Kang’s own process of defragmentation.

To decompress all these very exact images and fragments, to follow her in her own way to approach reality and metabolising her own lived experiences, her relations and ideas, her life as a neurodivergent person, her sentimental life, her life as an expat on a new land which is as foreign to her as her own motherland.2 These images then, this art which is so foreign to us at first glance, become more and more clear when we understand how it attempts to present us memories, feelings and ideas with an almost forensic precision.3 We look then at another painting where two people are lying in bed with their arms detached from them and lying on their respective sides, imagining it would help the ergonomics of sleeping together, and we understand how nothing here is improvised, nothing is an invention, figurative painting itself, as an art form, is although reinvented for us in this process. Naeun Kang brings it back anew to represent, to make us see, and feel the eerie and fantastic world she sees and that we couldn’t have otherwise seen, felt or imagined without the help of her savvy brushstrokes.

(Text by Mattia Lullini)

Notes

1 Definition of File system fragmentation (Accessed on October 3rd, 2025).
2 “[...] my past is what formed me/and part of me, and the accumulation of my experiences together with these other people are precisely what built up my relationship with them. […] I don’t think I’ve ever even tried to find meaning through painting, because it’s too black and white and it shuts down conversation, I want to think that it’s okay for my art to be the results or byproducts of my metabolising or processing of things (events, thoughts, feelings, experiences) and just be that, stay in that ambivalences (also opens up more conversation this way).” Naeun Kang, from a Whatsapp conversation with the author.
3 It is a way of working and creating images which we believe it originally taps into the roots of art making itself, not for the sake of art but for the sake of exactly depicting ideas and feelings which the artist would have no other way to describe. Coming from decades of post- movements one would be tempted to apply this concept to the figurative paintings Kang does, but I really believe this is not something post-, and neither something over-, nor in any other way hierarchically or chronologically related to other figurative art, Naeun Kang’s art goes beyond figuration, through the idea at its core to find a new place on the other side, which I would attempt to define preterfigurative art. We dare a definition since we are convinced that when an art practice challenges our ideas, it might be worth creating new words to describe it.