Thomas Kong
Site: The Economic Shop
Thomas Kong manages Kim’s Corner Food, a convenience store located in the Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. Working in collage and assemblage, Kong’s prolific production occurs entirely at Kim’s Corner Food during business hours. The store features an evolving installation of Kong’s work, produced over the past decade with found objects and surplus materials from the store’s operations. For Counterpublic, Kong extends this evolving process for Be Happy, an installation and exchange at The Economic Shop, an active convenience store on Cherokee Street. For Be Happy, Kong invites attendees to purchase an item in the store in exchange for a plastic shopping bag adorned with one of his iconic collages made from the material of his store.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Thomas Kong lives in Chicago, where he and his wife manage Kim’s Corner Food, a convenience store located in the city’s Rogers Park neighborhood. Working in collage and assemblage, Kong’s prolific production occurs entirely at Kim’s Corner Food during business hours: 8AM to 8PM, seven days a week. The store features an evolving installation of Kong’s work, produced over the past decade with found objects and surplus materials from the store’s operations.
Kong received a degree in English Literature from Sogang University in 1972, and has lived in the Chicago area since 1977. Since 2015 his work has been exhibited in nonprofit and artist-run spaces, galleries and art book fairs in the United States and internationally. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Roman Susan (Chicago), TCB Art Inc (Melbourne), Utrecht (Tokyo), 062 Gallery (Chicago), and Coco Hunday (Tampa). Recent group exhibitions include Kelly Kaczynski, Thomas Kong, Patric McCoy, and John Neff at Delmes & Zander (Cologne), Memory Palace at Circle Contemporary (Chicago), An Image for a Vessel at The Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation (Chicago), and a two-person exhibition with John Neff at Night Club (Chicago). In 2017 Kong, Nathan Abhalter Smith and Dan Miller were awarded a Propeller Fund grant for their collaborative project space The Back Room at Kim’s Corner Food, which operated from 2015–2019 in a former stockroom behind the convenience store.
