 |
| Heemin Chung, UMBRA Installation View @ Thaddaeus Ropac |
I was thrilled to be back gallery hopping in London't West End on Saturday, looking at old favorites and discovering new work. The pick of Saturday's exhibitions was work by an artist I didn't previously know. Heemin Chung has her first exhibition, UMBRA, with Thaddaeus Ropac in the spacious Ely House, Dover Street gallery. The multi-dimensionality of Chung's work stretches beyond its use of different media, reaching to discourses on memory, birth, death, monsters, and the refuse of city life.
 |
| Heemin Chung, It Quietly Exhales Colors, 2024 |
Instinctively, the works reminded me of the mucus out of which monsters have crawled after their gory birth in science fiction films such as Aliens. The composite gel, resin, oil, and acrylic crumpled on canvases could also be the stuff left by a snail or related mollusk as it slides across a carpet, garden or piece of furniture in this world, not the future. At times the resin like material is shiny, at others matte plastic looking, at still others, it is ashen grey. It can be clouded or clear tinged with red or blue or pink, sometimes appearing as fabric fallen having been blown by the wind, at others spread on with a spatula like icing on a cake. Whatever the creature that has left this refuse in its wake, it has gone, nowhere to be seen on a canvas or in the space of the gallery.
 |
| Heemin Chung, Days Unfold without Disappearing, 2024 |
This sense of something being born gives the material memories, a past, a history in which something important happened, but we can't be sure what. Because it leaves us to keep imagining the work becomes significant and dense, changing, living, breathing in time. Not all of what it evokes is creepy crawly; the gently fallen fabrics might a bride's veil blown off in the wind, for example. Carefree, playful, ethereal The gallery blurb quoted Chung as conceiving her work to speak to the transition from a physical to a virtual world in the city. "Through her process Chung addresses the material loss that occurs when three-dimensional forms are flattened into two-dimensional data, exploring the gap between technological and physical realities." In this sense, the works are also about transformation, metamorphosis and rebirth, not just birth and marriage. Of course, they are also invoking death, not only thanks to the darkness cast by dense black grounds. The blurb tells us that they also "reimagine the traditional Korean funeral ritual Chobun." In this ritual, the soul is freed from the body, and so, for Heemin Chung, even in death, there is anticipation of life, death as a form of rebirth.
 |
| Heemin Chung, From the Old Prophet, 2024 |
Artistically, the work also resonates with abstract painting. Resin, gel and various other non-painterly materials form colours and shapes on a canvas on a wall. There are landscapes filled with ravines, angry seascapes, and abstractions appearing in the works, some might say emerging from the works given that the three dimensional gel and acrylic are stuck on top of a canvas. Chung's works are also the size of paintings. In this sense, physically, they remind of the work of someone like Kiefer who uses the canvas as a support for sculpture to challenge the line between two forms.
There are also strong resonances with the work of Eva Hesse, again, speaking to the organic and the life that is held in hard resin. Fluids, forms, bodies, inside and outside are moving, shaping these odd sculptures. City refuse, death shrouds, brides veils, there is so much going on in these works that, like gooey mucus afterbirths of monsters, there is no telling where they came from or where they are going. A small amount of online research throws up hte fact that Chung is a rising star. And so she should be. This is definitely an artist to watch as her work is complex and dense, materially, conceptually, artistically.
No comments:
Post a Comment