ART CITIES: London-Heemin Chung

Heemin Chung investigates the material potential of digital images as she translates them into the mediums of painting and sculpture. Her work investigates how technology shapes contemporary perception and impacts our existential conditions, capturing various emotional responses and communication issues encountered in urban environments as technology advances. Through poetic visual metaphor, she reimagines traditional painting genres, including landscape and still life, engaging in experimental techniques to explore texture and volume across digital devices and canvas.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Archive

For “Ubra” her first solo exhibition in Europe, Heemin Chung presents a new body of paintings, sculptures and a video. Her artworks explore the sensorial impact of transitional states – from darkness to light, from virtual to physical – in the rapidly changing city of Seoul. As Chung explains, “In this city, technology has gone beyond mere convenience; it has fundamentally altered our relationship with space and time”.’ The title of the exhibition is reference to the deep shadows cast by celestial bodies, the exhibition unfolds a world of shadows, replicas and rituals. This investigation of our contemporary condition includes a reimagining of the traditional Korean funeral ritual Chobun*. The interplay between the physical and the virtual, the felt and the replicated, the seen and the unseen is central to Chung’s work. For her new series of paintings she was inspired by the objects that she encounters on early morning walks in the streets of Seoul: from man-made urban detritus to elements belonging to the natural world. Translucent and white layers cloud dark backgrounds with hints of purple and pink, capturing the softness of light, the fog and the subtle gradations of colour that occur at the break of dawn. 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. Sourcing digital images of similar objects – notably flowers, sea shells, bark and bird feathers, but also car shells and broken roads – her canvases are printed with this imagery and then built up with painted additions to synthesise them into new forms. Employing her signature use of gel medium, she creates membrane-like sheets, the surfaces of which are also at times digitally printed or painted, then draped, tucked and pinched onto the canvases or metallic structures. The resulting works offer echoed forms of the original objects and digital images, reconfiguring the genre of the still life as Chung asserts her innovative approach to painting. ‘Given its long history, I believe painting is a medium through which we are able to detect changes in the way we see and perceive,’ she says, reflecting on the effect of the digital realm on our contemporary perception. A series of multimedia sculptures presented in the exhibition reimagines the traditional Korean funeral ritual Chobun. This practice, predominantly performed in the Gyeongsangnam-do province, is intended to free the soul from the body, naming the process of tying the body to the ground or trees until the skeleton is exposed and subsequently buried. The Chobun ritual is often accompanied with a traditional Korean play, the Dasiraegi (Rebirth) which starts with a betrayal and ends with the birth of a child, conveying that life and death coexist. Chung explains: ‘At the site of death, our ancestors danced, joked, indulged in profane imaginations, and spoke of new births.’ In reference to Dasiraegi, the sculptures are presented on a raised LED platform to emulate the idea of a stage, casting the gallery as an arena for her art. Chung reinterprets the play in a new video using advanced 3D modelling. She restructures the ritual and the story’s framework, layering two different timelines – her own childhood and a day in the life of her grandfather. With an acute sensitivity to the societal dynamics of our era, Chung reflects on the intersection of life and death, technology and humanity, and the profound fatigue of contemporary existence in a digitised world.

* Chobun means literally a “straw grave”, a unique Korean burial custom has it that the body of a deceased person is not buried in the ground immediately, but is placed in a temporary grave similar to a thatch hut and is left there until it is completely defleshed. This makeshift straw structure is dismantled after two or three years, and the remains of the deceased are then given a proper burial.

Photo: Heemin Chung, It Quietly Exhales Colors, 2024, Gel medium, resin, stainless steel and copper pipe, 185 x 100 x 105 cm (72.83 x 39.37 x 41.34 in), © Heemin Chung, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Ely House, London, 37 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 8/10-20/11/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net/