Chae’s latest series of paintings centers on the concept of the installation as a process that organizes images and space in a way that affects our interpretation of art as well as our somatic relationship to it. Chae reimagines the space depicted within his paintings as something that can be fragmented into distinct parts. These parts then become something for the artist to orchestrate so as to create a synthetic whole that remains in tension with its discrete parts. As a result, his paintings stand out for their vivid planes of colors, stark lines, and conspicuous geometric shapes--mostly rectangles and squares. The latter rhyme with the frame of his paintings and thus convey a powerful sense of structure that counterbalances and contains the vastness of the empty and unspecified spaces he depicts.

Within these carefully constructed but desolate worlds, Chae places familiar props evocative of the art world--stucco walls, ladders, and the kind of pliable chairs and simple tables one finds at gallery fairs. Most striking of all are the human figures that populate these unsettlingly tranquil spaces. Often alone and seemingly lost in reverie or a deep state of contemplation these figures mimic the introspective behavior of art crowds and thus become uncanny doubles of us, Chae’s viewers--a clear nod to Surrealism from the artist. Chae’s work can therefore be read as a subtle but poignant critique of the art world or, more specifically, of its carefully constructed facade of sophistication, calculated presentation of art, and alienation of the general public--think, here, of the large swaths of people who are easily intimidated by the art world’s hushed white spaces and cryptic art. Overall, then, Chae provides a portrait of the institutional context that comes to shape the reading of his works, and, in this self-reflexiveness, pushes us to reconsider the unspecified and unexamined spaces that shape our existence as much as his art.