Konhee Chang

The Kandinsky Chamber is composed of sculptural elements and a live sound installation.

The Chamber realizes and challenges Kandinsky’s theories concerning the spiritual in art. The focus is made on the theories of synthesis and abstraction that Kandinsky used to embody in his paintings the spirituality that he believed was independent of the phenomenal world external to the picture. The spatial orders between the pictorial elements in the 1923 painting Circles in a Circle are abstracted from the painting and translated into temporal musical orders that are used to compose the live sounds sampled in various locations inside the gallery into one. This resulting sound is in a state of constant flux, generated by coinciding activities inside the gallery. The Chamber creates a multi-sensory space where spirituality is generated by and accessed through subjective phenomenal experience of the space. The spirituality in the Chamber inherits Kandinsky’s methods of abstraction and synthesis, but challenges his demarcation between the spiritual and the phenomenal.