DESSAU-ROßLAU.- In preparation for the centennial To the Core. Bauhaus Dessau 100, relic-like fragments from the history of the Bauhaus become artistic materials in the exhibition Sacristy by Kang Sunkoo, as a prelude for what will come. Raised in South Korea and the Rhineland, Kang is grappling with the mythically exaggerated charge and worship of the historical Bauhaus. In addition, he follows the traces of faith at the Bauhaus and connects them to his own biography. The exhibition is on view from 28 February – 19 October 2025 in the Bauhaus Building in Dessau.

In Sacristy, Kang Sunkoo is addressing mythically charged modernism and its proximity to religion. Its historical objects and places have become design icons and pilgrimage sites for many people. Kang Sunkoo is taking up the materials glass, concrete, and metal in his artworks and relating them to objects of the same materials from the collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. As a result of Kang’s installation, the Workshop Wing of the Bauhaus Building recalls a two-nave church. A stainless-steel construction – which from a certain perspective resembles a Cross of Saint Peter – is placed opposite a zinc bathtub from the collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. The works Monstranz (Monstrance) and Golgatha (Calvary) are located in the adjacent nave. Whereas Monstranz presents a Luxfer prism glass as a sacred object, Golgatha integrates a broken-off Rapidbalken (Rapid Beam) of reinforced concrete from the housing estate in Dessau-Törten designed by Walter Gropius.

With the parament in which the first and last words of the Bauhaus Programme of 1919 are embroidered, the artist is taking up – as he does in the other works as well – aspects of sacrality in the historical Bauhaus. He reinforces this with the use of daylight – during the entire exhibition, the room will remain free of artificial lighting.

Kang Sunkoo, born in in Seoul in 1977, lives in Basel

Kang studied architecture at the RWTH Aachen and worked as an architect for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, among others. From 2011 to 2019, he assisted the artist Ai Weiwei in Berlin. He taught with him at the Universität der Künste.

Kang began is work as a freelance visual artist with Statue of Limitations, a Kunst am Bau (Art in Architecture) project at the Humboldt Forum and on Manga-Bell-Platz in Berlin. For the Schlemmer Master’s House, Kang installed the work Schrein (Shrine) as part of the Gracious Hosts project. The artist is currently realizing Heimat Heimat (Homeland, Homeland) for the German Federal Office of the Interior and Community in Berlin and Urhütte (Primitive Hut) for the German Federal Office of Radiation Protection.