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Lot Essay
The career of Chun Kwang-Young can be divided into several phases. From 1969 to 1977 during his study in the United States, Chun took up with aspects of American-style Abstract Expressionism. Almost a decade of struggle and experiment in the US produced in the artist the confounding realization that his Korean values might be fundamentally at odds with the predicates of American society. He came to realize that by embracing a visually compelling and formally dynamic pictorial approach he had, in effect, largely ignored or discarded the Korean traditions and visual languages to which he was deeply, if subconsciously, attached.
Returning to Korea in 1977, Chun undertook an exploration into alternative methods in visual senses on social conflicts he experienced in the Korean cultural landscape. He embarked on a systematic search for appropriately innovative forms and techniques with which he could align his interest in abstraction, light and colour with a wider set of interests that it took almost two decades to articulate. Not surprisingly, the artist's work maintained a strong sense of formal continuity from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, punctuated by an important formal shift ushered in during the later 1980s, when he turned to a mode of visual consolidation based on aggregation.
Building on the contoured topography and cratered "landscapes" conjured from the shaded gradations of his recent wall works, in 2003 Chun went to work on a sequence of suspended spheres covered, ubiquitously, with his trademark triangular packets in obvious emulation of globes or planets. Even if somewhat indirectly, these works make good on a career-long commitment to ethically far-reaching allegorical narratives couched in the languages of death, catastrophe, and oblivion. One point of issuance correlates with Chun's creation of surrogate spaces—and eventually substitute worlds—marked by the impact of violent marking, and addressing, as he put it, the "scars of our bodies, conflicts between society members, wars between nations."
One of the several Korean traditions from which Chun draws is bojagi: the wrapping of objects for safekeeping or protection during transport. Yet this allusion is accompanied by a deviation through late industrial culture, as Chun's hand-folded parcels are "stuffed" with wedges of Styrofoam (a "foamed" plastic derived from polystyrene). This light material serves the practical purpose of giving shape and mass to the wrapped paper fragments and also acts as both barricade and bridge between very different material cultures.
In addition to bojagi, Chun's work after 1995 has been informed by the tradition of Korean origami, a long-practiced craft of creating small folded figures in paper as devotional reminders. Folding and forming the mulberry paper into packets is a reiterative physical practice that accords with Chun's desire to address both the sociocultural rifts that beset his homeland and the wider conditions of human trauma and suffering: "I have wrapped and tied tens of thousands of triangles made from Korean mulberry paper to embrace my deep longing."
Conflict is still a central motivation, but it is no longer a force that compels his work to engage in exaggerated forms of pictorial expression and coloristic overlay, becoming instead a kind of antithesis in a new material dialectic—something to be cured or resolved. The past is not simply kept alive through references to, say, Korean landscape painting but is retrieved from forgotten texts unearthed in rural towns and villages and then reconfigured by the artist into other dimensions of possibility, including the provision of new temporal and spatial experiences and a startling and seductive topography that assembles, complicates, and even effaces a vast reservoir of visual and textual significations.
An excerpt edit from John C. Welchman, "Kwang Young Chun: The Metaphysics of Aggregation"
Returning to Korea in 1977, Chun undertook an exploration into alternative methods in visual senses on social conflicts he experienced in the Korean cultural landscape. He embarked on a systematic search for appropriately innovative forms and techniques with which he could align his interest in abstraction, light and colour with a wider set of interests that it took almost two decades to articulate. Not surprisingly, the artist's work maintained a strong sense of formal continuity from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, punctuated by an important formal shift ushered in during the later 1980s, when he turned to a mode of visual consolidation based on aggregation.
Building on the contoured topography and cratered "landscapes" conjured from the shaded gradations of his recent wall works, in 2003 Chun went to work on a sequence of suspended spheres covered, ubiquitously, with his trademark triangular packets in obvious emulation of globes or planets. Even if somewhat indirectly, these works make good on a career-long commitment to ethically far-reaching allegorical narratives couched in the languages of death, catastrophe, and oblivion. One point of issuance correlates with Chun's creation of surrogate spaces—and eventually substitute worlds—marked by the impact of violent marking, and addressing, as he put it, the "scars of our bodies, conflicts between society members, wars between nations."
One of the several Korean traditions from which Chun draws is bojagi: the wrapping of objects for safekeeping or protection during transport. Yet this allusion is accompanied by a deviation through late industrial culture, as Chun's hand-folded parcels are "stuffed" with wedges of Styrofoam (a "foamed" plastic derived from polystyrene). This light material serves the practical purpose of giving shape and mass to the wrapped paper fragments and also acts as both barricade and bridge between very different material cultures.
In addition to bojagi, Chun's work after 1995 has been informed by the tradition of Korean origami, a long-practiced craft of creating small folded figures in paper as devotional reminders. Folding and forming the mulberry paper into packets is a reiterative physical practice that accords with Chun's desire to address both the sociocultural rifts that beset his homeland and the wider conditions of human trauma and suffering: "I have wrapped and tied tens of thousands of triangles made from Korean mulberry paper to embrace my deep longing."
Conflict is still a central motivation, but it is no longer a force that compels his work to engage in exaggerated forms of pictorial expression and coloristic overlay, becoming instead a kind of antithesis in a new material dialectic—something to be cured or resolved. The past is not simply kept alive through references to, say, Korean landscape painting but is retrieved from forgotten texts unearthed in rural towns and villages and then reconfigured by the artist into other dimensions of possibility, including the provision of new temporal and spatial experiences and a startling and seductive topography that assembles, complicates, and even effaces a vast reservoir of visual and textual significations.
An excerpt edit from John C. Welchman, "Kwang Young Chun: The Metaphysics of Aggregation"