Art Cologne

Can spaces, gestures, or objects bear memory beyond the self?

THK Gallery's presentation at Art Cologne 2025, in cooperation with DOD Gallery, brings together Jeehye Song, Thomas Wachholz, and Abdus Salaam, whose modes of practice test how form becomes a vessel of resonance-holding traces of movement, thought, and encounter beyond their moment of creation "Between gesture and material, memory lingers, not as a record of what was, but as an echo of what remains."

The presentation probes how matter carries the echoes of memory, experience, and time. Art, in its variable guises, is not merely something on which to gaze but a living site of perception. Drawing on Rosalind Krauss’s “expanded field” of 1979, the exhibition assumes meaning arises in and from relationships-between body and space, material and gesture, memory and the act of viewing.

Jeehye Song builds immersive, painterly worlds from the motions of home and the transient emotions that pass through an individual. Working primarily in oil, her paintings, such as Sprinkler at home (2024), Fountain at home (2024), and Don’t look at me, otherwise I’ll punch you (2025), negotiate the thresholds between intimate and surreal. Everyday scenarios play out as sites of tenderness, fatigue, and hushed resistance, disclosing the fragile topography of feeling in an era that calls for composure and control. It is within this space that Song creates what she calls an "emotional gap" - a pausing point where sensations might reside, without needing to be fixed or explained or resolved.

Thomas Wachholz investigates repetition, structure, and transformation with soot, phosphorus, and cardboard. His Honeycomb series (2023–2025) captures rhythm, reduction, and gesture, yielding results that are minimal but volatile-records of ignition, contact, and erasure. Wachholz invites viewers to witness how process itself can be an imprint of time.

Abdus Salaam works across sculpture, installation, and video to explore spiritual and ecological continuities. In Heartwood Symphonic: Earth and Light (2023) and Open to the light (2025), his pigmented resin alludes to geological and cosmic rhythms. Light is both medium and metaphor-suggestive of renewal, transcendence, and the being's cyclical nature. His work encourages a slower, more embodied form of attention, disclosing the vitality within stillness.

Together, these artists cultivate a shared language of sensitivity and transformation. Their practices converge to form a contemplative space that blurs distinctions between seeing and feeling, object and memory.

At Booth B-316, THK and DOD Gallery invite audiences to consider: what gesture, shape, or movement lingers after the encounter? The exhibition unfolds as a living environment, a conversation between material and meaning, perception and presence, the self and what lies beyond it.