Encoded Realms

Chan Sook Choi, Annette Cords, Katrin von Lehmann, Bettina Scholz, Hara Shin

05.09.2025 - 07.11. 2025

Anni Albers described the act of “beginning”, that moment when the fog of uncertainty still obscures potential possibilities, as “exploration, selection, development, a strong vitality that is not yet limited, not yet defined by the tried and tested and the traditional.” For Albers, who was one of the most important voices of Bauhaus and a pioneer of European textile art, every beginning was like an “adventure of discovery” in which the process itself, rather than the result, becomes central. When working with machinery and tools to create art, this rings especially true. Often, artists find unique ways of engaging new technology through innovation and errors, in which the medium becomes central to the artwork created. The Jacquard weaving loom was one of the defining inventions of the industrial age, and its binary programming later inspired the mathematician Ada Lovelace to write the first ever code in 1843, before computers had even been invented. 

With the exhibition Encoded Realms, Kang Contemporary highlights the historical connection between analog and digital worlds. The artists featured in the exhibition are distinguished by their unique and innovative collaboration with their respective materials. From computer collages woven on Jacquard looms over photographs where the material is as much a subject as the image, to interweaving materials in digital space that make familiar societal fabrics unrecognizable. In this exhibition, the gallery space becomes an interplay of textures and materials. The fluorescent lights of the New Media artworks are absorbed into the deep interwoven folds of haptic techniques, emphasizing the digital space – which often appears two-dimensional and infallible – as three-dimensional and alive. After all, programming, like weaving, is an adventure of exploration. Both weaving and coding, in their early stages, require repeated “listening” to the material and embracing unexpected glitches that disrupt the fabric’s uniformity. What is at stake when we see our world as a textile where fibers weave back and forth and around each other? The artists in this exhibition show us that history, memory, and human relationships –  often imagined as linear progressions – can be embraced in all their complexities and intersections. 

Chan Sook Choi treats digital space not as a neutral screen but as a material field, where social and historical tensions manifest through uncanny digital logics. In her video installation, The Tumble (2023), the title-giving rolling, wind‑borne organism serves as both subject and metaphor. As an accidental weaver, it reminds us that non-human actors also shape creative and generative ecosystems. Choi’s previous research led her to Arizona, where she encountered an archive of absence: Instead of the tumble weeds, she encountered biographies of Native American veterans who are complexly marginalized in the US. Choi uncovers personal and collective histories that have been exiled, intentionally or inadvertently, from systems, communities, and territories. The video unfolds within an abandoned mega‑mart, “Phoenix Mart.” Over time, it has become overgrown with tumbleweed that drifts in and around the empty structure. The crumbling, warehouse-like interior felt to Choi like a graveyard of commerce and man-made structures, lending the work a haunting resonance. Embedded in the work are Choi’s ongoing concerns around identity, memory, and archival practices. 

Annette Cords' tapestries InBetween 3 (2020) and In Other Words (2022) blend arrows, numbers, and lettering into a collage of signs and symbols, bringing these layered communication tools, which often fill the background of everyday life, into the spotlight. She draws inspiration from her immediate urban environment, where numerous street signs, advertising spaces, flyers, and graffiti tags overlap and complement one another. Using computer technology, Cords translates this visual language first into digital collages and then into punch cards, which eventually undergo a final intermedial transformation into tapestries woven on historic Jacquard looms. Fully aware of the deep historical link between Jacquard looms and computers, her works intentionally echo this retroactive connection. Although Cords prepares her tapestries extensively on the computer, her process involves exploration and trial and error. She repeatedly checks, dissolves, and adjusts the texture and arrangement of the weave. Her practice echoes Anni Albers' vivid description of beginning as a boundless vitality. Her acrylic works involve similar exploratory processes, creating abstract geometries and surprising organic elements that evoke an interplay between a natural and digital visual world. Like her tapestries, these post-industrial images juxtapose with the material, revealing irregularities and the uniqueness that stems from manual craft practices. 

In her work, Katrin von Lehmann experiments with techniques of repetition and rhythm. Here, “experimenting” is to be understood in the scientific sense, because in her unique practice, she develops experimental paradigms which she strictly adheres to in her creative process. In this way, the artist turns herself into a machine, an instrument of practice and discovery. Simultaneously, her artworks reveal human fallibility, which repeatedly emerges in the rhythm of their continuous repetition. In her series Oben wird unten, wird! (2025), the weaving of paper results in particularly fascinating artworks. From a distance, no manipulation of the paper is apparent, but upon closer inspection, the weaving of two photographs is clearly recognizable. The play with the visible and the invisible is a central point of tension, as is indicated by the series’ title: Above becomes Below. Woven under each overlapping row is a hidden strand that is not visible to the eye. Weaving brings a scientific order to the disorder of nature depicted in the photographs: A brief triumph of man over that which is impossible to grasp and control. Katrin von Lehman's Blackboard Drawing 1 (2015) also works with illusion and repetition. They arose from one of von Lehmann's many interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists. When talking to meteorologists about weather phenomena, the artist was fascinated by the scientists' reliance on drawings on blackboards, in which von Lehmann recognized a dynamic and artistic aesthetic. The repeated perforations disrupt the drawings in an uncontrolled manner and emphasize the fragility of the paper.

Bettina Scholz constructs material explorations through multisheet glass compositions, where alchemical gestures – dripping, spraying, layering, collaging – assemble dense pictorial ecosystems. Inspired by science fiction, Gothic painting, and musical abstraction, her works feel both cosmic and microscopic. At the heart of Scholz’s process is glass, chosen not merely as support but as carrier, filter, and framing device. Scale becomes ambiguous as the glass simultaneously resembles a petri dish in a lab or a window to a vast desert. Drawing inspiration from film soundtracks and speculative and futuristic narratives such as Blade Runner 2049, Scholz translates audible atmospheres into iridescent hues. The resulting visual fields are at once lush and ominous: baroque-like surfaces crackle with chthonic energy, evoking dystopian landscapes that hover between attraction and unease. Scholz’s play with coexisting, sometimes surprising juxtaposition derives from her upbringing in the GDR, where her life was defined by contradiction: East and West, trust and suspicion, esotericism and evidence.  In works like Intro (2025), pigment and glass intertwine across layers, generating textured resonances that intensify warm tones and heighten atmospheric density. The weave of light, shadow, and pigment creates a relational space in which each layer cannot be viewed individually. Between harmony and spectral corruption, the materials override one another. Scholz establishes a form of painting that is less object than resonance, alive, full of conflict, and generative force.

Hara Shin’s practice moves between film and multimedia installation, creating micro-narratives that braid fragments of history and spill beyond the screen into the analog world. In delicate constellations of human and non-human, past, present and future, the peripheries of memory and matter become sites of inquiry, where the body serves as a tactile vessel to anchor history in the material world. In Monumental Ether.Bodies. (2024), Shin assembles a three-channel video installation in which histories fold onto one another like woven threads. Across three sites, her lens traces anthropocentric violence and its afterlives: Kückenmühler Anstalten in Szczecin, once a locus of forced sterilization; Lisbon’s Tropical Botanical Garden, a living remnant of colonial extraction; and Tancheon Stream in Seoul, steeped in local mythologies. Shin’s fictional future protagonist moves through these layered sites: From the dark and enclosed ruins, into the bright, brimming garden, to the open and vast space of the stream, with the skyline of Seoul towering in the distance. Bodies, plants, and architecture are threads that interlace, absorb, and transform each other through tactile sensibilities. The video reflects history and memory as a continually composed, ingested, and transformed fabric unfolding persistently into the present and never disappearing. By weaving moving images of specific historical sites, Shin blurs the boundary between documentary and fiction, crafting a nonlinear cartography of cohabitation and loss. Alongside the video, Shin presents a room installation in the gallery space. The translucent fabric hangs like a veil among the other artworks. Through the veil, the view is blocked, and the space is reconfigured. The exhibition’s central themes of visible and invisible, above and below, and the connection between individual material entities are extended into space, including the audience in an embodied relational experience. The gallery space itself becomes an “Encoded Realm” where the presence of artworks and viewers encrypt each element into a collective code. 

Text Paula Böke