Text by Jonathan Goodman
Kwang Young Chun’s abstract constructions, made of hundreds of individual component shapes wrapped in mulberry paper, beautifully bridge the gap between Western and Asian art. It is close to impossible, excluding exceptional cases, for Western and Eastern ways of seeing to meet in a common style of figurative art, although it does happen—most recently, we have seen for several generations a strong interest in traditional oil painting in, of all places, Mainland China, where artists have fallen in love with the medium and the attempt to render a realism that is looks Occidental. Now it is much easier for the Asian artist to participate in the internationally established language of abstraction, which began with Western modernism but has expanded to include the entire world, including Asia, where abstraction is practiced with great sympathy and skill. Chun’s art embraces Western culture in more than a few ways, but this is not to say that the Seoul-based artist has turned away from all suggestions of Asia in his work; the materials making up his art, mulberry leaves, relate to his biography: the leaves connect with Chun’s early memory of their use in his family pharmacy. But the most telling point about Chun as an artist is his decision to work with abstract, often geometrical shapes that reflect an ongoing knowledge of nonobjective visual culture in the West.
Chun has visited America many times and is familiar with the established language of abstraction seen so regularly in an art center such as New York. The art world here has taken a strong interest in Chun’s pieces, which often go under the name of “Aggregates,” a word referring to the myriad elements making up each individual sculpture he has created. Chun’s variously colored and shaped low reliefs can look a lot like paintings, given their status as low reliefs, their rectangular shape, and their attachment like pictures to a gallery or museum wall. Other pieces are more sculpture, being composed of rounded, brightly colored troughs excavated within a flat plane less lively in hue.
The true gift of Chun’s style is his marvelous surface, ever changing as the eye travels across the exterior of his sculptures and its complicated, multipart exterior. The abstractions’ façade relates in some ways to twentieth-century American nonobjective paintings. But at the same time, they develop a connection with by-now established Asian languages of abstraction, particularly Korean, which tend to emphasize the texture and finish of the work of art. Still, whatever the influences brought to light in Chun’s remarkable creative efforts, it is clear that they are very much his own invention and resemble the art of no one else, either in the West or in Korea. This results in a form of individualism we don’t necessarily associate with the graceful sublimations of Asian art. But it works wonderfully, and has made for an outstanding exhibition.
Given the extraordinary intensity and amount of cultural information exchanged among artists from all over the world, it has become a commonplace that people borrow from each other. This means that art can no longer be categorized easily by geography or culture: as an African curator commented, there is no longer African art but only art from Africa. Chun’s work does not necessarily look Korean in a traditional sense, and that is one of its strengths. As viewers we are not committed to a cultural bias that would isolate the work by fixing its cultural boundaries. Indeed, the question, How Korean is it?, no longer can have relevance in an art world in which styles are used interchangeably and without regard for their origins. Instead, the myriad interlocking parts of Chun’s art may be understood as a way of commenting on the remarkable mosaic of people and individual styles now constituting the art world. Chun’s aggregations may not have been constructed with this notion in mind, but it is interesting to consider a method that so brilliantly reflects the visual circumstances of our time.
Formally, the work stands out as a tour de force of the hand. Sometimes, the sculptures make a case for biological forms—cells and viruses whose bright hues seem to relate to specimens in found true science. In this way, Chun makes it clear that his abstractions (indeed, all art abstractions) can never fully deny a connection to nature, no matter how anti-figurative they may seem to be. The boundaries between realism and nonobjective art are more porous than they seem. Even so, the biological cast and implications of Chun’s work does not do away with our first impression that this work is about itself—abstraction being an art given to self-determination. Yet art is of course always a cultural construct, deriving strength from its contact with the outside world. While it cannot be said that abstraction is only about itself, it is true that Chun’s efforts collectively comprise a self-made language, one immediately recognizable for its own attributes, which tend to assert idealized form. Inevitably, there is a tension, or even a contradiction, between realism and its abstract counterpoint, but this is relatively slight in Chun’s sculptures. Instead, we seen a language in which the overall configuration is developed from accumulations of small forms, which, when viewed singly and close up, are interesting in and of themselves.
The other important aspect of Chun’s oeuvre is its tenacity of craft. In America now, the art world is intellectualized and politicized—to the point where formal practice is not often considered or even understood as needed. The craft that goes into Chun’s sculptures is neither decorative nor folk in its implications. It is an integral part of the structure of his work. In Korean contemporary art, technical skill is usually a major part of its attractiveness, and this holds true in Chun’s case. Even so, that does not mean Chun has moved into a language that is only crafted; the great strength of the “Aggregations” series has to do with its formal intelligence—its independence of shape and its rejection of the simple in favor of the complex. Together, in a group, as this fine museum show demonstrates, Chun’s artworks transform a neutral, white-cubed space into a magical place, where the sculptures join together in a discussion about the formal possibilities of art. Craft is the means by which Chun develops the conversation. The biographical origins of the materials lend a personal touch to work that asserts an idealized vision of what art can be. These seeming contradictions, between public and private, abstract and figurative, intellectual and emotional, are quite literally reshaped into an entirety we can only admire—and respect for its integrity.
Jonathan Goodman