- Artist Suejin Chung
See through Our Eyes
2010
Installation view
DOOSAN Gallery is pleased to present Suejin Chung’s solo exhibition, See through Our Eyes. The show will be on view from September 2nd to 29th. It is Chung’s first solo exhibition in Korea since 2006. She introduces her own visual language through her paintings fully filled up with numerous shapes and elements.
Chung tries to establish a visual logic system that breaks through all the forms and shapes of the paintings. The visual logic literally means a ‘paradigm just by seeing an object.’ For this reason, she distinguishes the act of ‘seeing’ from the visual logic system. We are easily captured by existing knowledge or unrealized concept when we look at an image. However, this may not apply to ‘seeing’ Chung’s works and grasp her pictorial language. She insists on a necessity of ‘objective seeing’ to fully understand the essential meaning of painting and numerous detailed or abstract forms expressed on her paintings. She wants for viewers to ‘see’ a ‘presence’ of things and images objectively not subjectively.
By ‘seeing’ images in Chung’s way, there will only two most fundamental things remain: color and shape. Among the images and forms filling the every corner of the canvas, there are familiar images of people, faces, plants, and daily objects. These images seem to contain a meaning or to tell a story. However, they are just visualized images formed of simple shapes and forms that cannot be read. Therefore, even with the details and actual elements, Chung’s paintings become closer to an abstraction.
The images generated by the process of shapes and colors are expressed on the screen, the most fundamental dimension of the painting. There, a multidimensional visual space is created between visible and invisible domain. Chung presents a potential of various interpretations on this system of multidimensional space with cumulative layers of shapes and structures. In this way, she tries to find the basic and conceptual structure that allows and creates diverse images. This is the visual language that Chung is trying to develop and the point what viewers may pay attention to.
Chung is persistently looking for the structure of this visual language. By her way of ‘seeing’, viewers can learn how the ‘multi dimensional geometry’ based on the visual language develops.
Suejin Chung (1969- ) lives and works in Seoul. She obtained B.F.A. from the Hongik University and M.F.A. from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She had her solo exhibitions at Arario Gallery Seoul (2006), Arario Gallery New York (2009), and Project Space Sarubia (2000). She has also participated in various exhibitions in DOOSAN Gallery in New York (D-AiR, 2009), Espace Louis Vuitton in Paris (Metamorphoses: Korean Trajectories, 2008), and all around the world, including U.S., Europe, and in Asia. In 2009, Chung participated in the DOOSAN Artist in Residence Program in New York as one on the first group of artists.