Thomas Kong, who remodeled a Chicago comfort retailer into an artwork surroundings, has died

Thomas Kong, an artist who made whimsical, joyous collages cannily composed of meals packaging, plastic baggage and different materials scraps, usually sourced from the comfort retailer he operated in Chicago for 17 years, died on 1 Could. He was 73.

The trigger was issues of pneumonia, based on curator SY Lim, who has labored intently with Kong lately. Kong was recognized with leukaemia a number of weeks in the past and was present process chemotherapy.

For near a decade Kong quietly made artwork behind his store counter within the neighbourhood of Rogers Park, reducing up objects together with cigarette packs and snack packing containers and glueing them onto cardboard or styrofoam containers. He usually added a slip of paper printed with the phrases “Be blissful”. The shop, Kim’s Nook Meals, grew to become a form of gallery, too, as Kong’s creations steadily lined each inch of the room, lining the cabinets and dotting fridge doorways and the espresso station. An ATM stands by a wall papered with a beguiling hodgepodge: a creatively pruned Package Kat wrapper, pristinely layered packaging with excised provenance, cut-out letters that spell “Money station right here”.

Kong’s collages shortly bought the eye of different native artists, together with a neighbour, Dan Miller, who in 2015 labored with Kong to open a neighborhood artwork house within the store’s storage room. The Again Room hosted exhibitions by different artists whose practices intersected with Kong’s personal, and it housed Kong’s fast-growing archive, which guests might peruse. By the point the Again Room closed in March 2019, Kong and his retailer had develop into fixtures in Chicago’s wealthy neighborhood of artist-run areas.

“His artwork had a component of shock and humour, that are very a lot part of the Chicago vibe within the artwork scene,” Allison Peters Quinn, director of the Hyde Park Artwork Middle, says. “Artists would hear concerning the retailer from different artists and make the pilgrimage to Rogers Park to see his installations. I feel artists actually revered how he integrated his work life and artistic life—his artwork was made alongside stocking aisles.”

Kong additionally more and more exhibited his work in galleries in his later years, though he by no means acquired a serious institutional solo exhibition in his lifetime. In 2020, his collages have been featured in Artists Run Chicago 2.0, a serious exhibition on the Hyde Park Artwork Middle that celebrated Chicago’s impartial artwork scene. In December 2022, the Design Museum of Chicago hosted a solo exhibition of his work in a pop-up exhibition house.

Lim, the chief director of Chicago’s 062 gallery, is answerable for a lot of this effort to convey Kong’s works to a larger public. After assembly in 2017, the 2 developed a robust friendship, partly due to their shared Korean heritage (“I requested him if I ought to name him grandpa in Korean,” Lim says. “He mentioned, ‘Completely not. I don’t wish to be referred to as grandpa. I wish to be your pal.’”). Lim inspired Kong to exhibit extra broadly, together with at 062, and commenced discovering extra platforms to promote his artwork.

“I actually simply thought that folks ought to see his work and what he was really doing, particularly being a minority,” Lim says. “He was actually particular. The best way he sees all these objects—something within the retailer, something he might discover on the road, was mainly supplies. The entire world was stuffed with artwork supplies.”

Born Tae Kwon Kong on 16 January 1950, in what was then Hwanghae Province in North Korea, Kong got here to artwork in his 60s. His dad and mom have been landowning farmers when North Korean communists kidnapped and murdered his father, he instructed Borderless Journal in 2021. When he was six months outdated, he and his mom and 5 sisters escaped on a rowboat to Deokjeokdo island in Incheon, South Korea. Kong went to Sogang College in Seoul to review English literature and after graduating labored for a Korean airline, which gave him the chance to journey to locations together with Singapore, Taiwan and Bangkok.

It was Chicago the place Kong made his lasting residence, in 1977, after he married Sandy Kong, who survives him. His youngest sister had moved there three years previous to pursue a profession in nursing and requested him to affix her on a household visa. “The economic system in Korea was very dangerous on the time, and America was very dream-worthy to me,” he instructed Borderless Journal. Kong recalled going through language obstacles, however he shortly picked up work at a gasoline station. He spent the next a long time working companies usually run by different immigrants of his technology who settled in the USA: shoe-repair outlets in Hammond, Indiana, then Skokie, Illinois, then liquor outlets, adopted by a dry-cleaning enterprise. In 2006, he returned to Chicago and took over a store run by a Korean man named Kim.

As Kong remembered it, he started collaging round 2014, nearly on a whim. He was cleansing the store’s cabinets and had an concept to brighten them. He lower up packages and lined the surfaces with the paper earlier than arranging the merchandise on prime. “I assumed it was ornament, inside design. It appeared good,” he instructed Borderless Journal. “Then I had an concept to chop completely different paper shapes and use completely different colors, and I began placing them on the home windows, the partitions, outdoor, and the shop appeared just a little higher. The purchasers mentioned it appeared good. They mentioned it was lovely, form of uncommon.”

Kong saved making collages whereas manning the money register, from 8am to 8pm every day, persevering with almost as much as the top. Slicing and arranging supplies was a solution to move time, nevertheless it additionally stuffed him with a way of completion, he mentioned. He even spent many hours at Kim’s throughout the peak of the pandemic, filling the room with new work. Lim, who was supporting him by bringing him groceries and ordering him meals, estimates that the quantity of labor within the store doubled throughout this era as a result of the proprietor was so prolific.

Now, Chicago’s artist neighborhood, which counts Kong as one among its personal, faces the problem of the way to protect his work, which is entwined along with his career and office. “How can we not lose Thomas’s story? How can we not lose the authenticity of what he was in a position to create?” Peters Quinn says. “I hope that folks assist efforts to protect historical past like this that goes on quietly within the daily—that if we didn’t have, our lives could be a lot extra uninteresting.”

To start out, Lim and Kong’s son, Marshall Kong, have organised a GoFundMe marketing campaign to assist cowl the prices of working Kim’s Nook Meals till the top of June so it stays accessible to the general public. Lim has additionally enlisted the photographer Guanyu Xu to doc the store and the architectural designer Andrea Hunt to 3D scan its inside. Lim hopes to ultimately publish a ebook on Kong’s life and work and discover an establishment that can look after his archives. She additionally desires to fulfil Kong’s want of exhibiting his work in his residence nation of South Korea.

For a lot of artists who handed via Kim’s Nook Meals, Kong’s legacy lies in one thing aspirational: the fidelity of his pursuits and his capacity to seemingly at all times take pleasure in creating. Max Man, who exhibited within the Again Room in 2016, describes Kong as “the Giving Tree”—an artist who impressed different artists to be “as resourceful and as prolific and as free as I noticed him.

“Even in Chicago, the place it’s very simple to make work, persons are nonetheless burdened by a lot after they make it,” Man says. “He was a reminder of how you can make work with out burden and nonetheless espouse all of the values of a Chicago artist. At its greatest—and it was fairly often at its greatest—it was an unburdened studio observe.”

Kong might not initially have thought of his collages artwork, however he “totally embraced being an artist” in his ultimate years, Lim says. “Loads of our buddies have been impressed by him and his work ethic—a Korean man who was very humble, making work daily … and at all times smoking a lot within the retailer. He was an artist of artists.”