Soojin Kang, 'To be you, whoever you are'

As if behind each woven wickerman lurks a bronze statue by Auguste Rodin

Things that are uncanny: talking dolls, monkeys in masks (as in the Pierre Huyghe film), not-quite-human robots (of ‘uncanny valley’ fame), your doppelgänger. Also: Soojin Kang’s sculptures at Gathering, a series of human figures made of coarse fabric woven over steel frames. In Kang’s work, this Freudian feeling doesn’t arrive in the form of some childhood fantasy that your mind thought it best to block out. At ‘To be you, whoever you are’, I witnessed a different ‘return of the repressed’, a strange resurrection of classical sculpture.

When I say ‘classical sculpture’ I mean marble and bronze nude human forms in expressive poses, in dialogue with antiquity. Kang’s themes of the fragmentary body and the expressive gesture are traceable to earlier prototypes, which themselves also look back into the past. Some are quite specific: I spotted at least three Rodins. Kang’s delicate linen hands arranged on plinths upstairs recall Rodin’s clay hand models that filled the drawers of his Paris studio. In the basement, which could be a nightmarish Musée Rodin, there are three figures standing in a circle. Their sad, defeated look and raised arms cite both Rodin’s Prodigal Son and his Burghers of Calais at the same time.

The canon resurfaces as if from the sculptural unconscious – something we shouldn’t mention, as if its presence were embarrassing. It emerges jumbled and confused. The bust at the top of the stairs takes its form from the Renaissance portrait bust, cut off beneath the shoulders, but with its abstracted features and tilted head, it also starts to morph into one of those oval heads of Picasso’s, like the bronze Head of a Woman. Picasso, Rodin, The Renaissance: these unfashionable referents feel like they are waiting for some kind of ironic takedown or subversive gesture, but it doesn’t come.

You might say this is interpretative overreach, that any over-life-size sculpture of the human form could recall others. That’s the point: these sculptures, however contemporary they might feel, installed together in a warehouse-style basement, cannot escape the past. That’s why they give more than simple ghoulish pleasure (though there’s plenty of that). Dressed up as zombies, undead and resistant to the notion of originality, they theatricalise the way that the canon still lurks behind the way we approach sculpture, though we might prefer not to mention it.

Using the technique of weaving, often coded as feminine, Kang sets up these suffering figures as if they would like to be free from their canonical, masculine past, but cannot quite shake it off. So they have ended up echoing it, materially antithetical to its values, yet defined by their uncanny relation to a canon that defies obsolescence. This simple, subtle gesture makes for a layered show, and strikes me as true.

‘To be you, whoever you are’ ran at Gathering, London, from 11 May to 17 June 2023.