Sunny Chyun’s solo exhibition “I Came to Believe” features a site-specific installation of ten of her new paintings. Sunny’s mixed media works on canvas are painted, drawn, sewed and embellished on both sides of the painting and will be hung from the ceiling to create a sensory experience for the viewer. The gallery lighting will illuminate through the perforated canvases and create patterns on the gallery walls and gallery viewers will have the opportunity to view the works from all angles.
Like the exhibition title suggests, Sunny’s artistic practice narrates a personal journey, of becoming to believe a power greater than herself. In her art making, the obsessive-compulsive rituals of editing, reworking, erasing and embellishing of her art-making acts as a coping mechanism for internalizing and releasing existential anxiety. It involves an alchemical process that physically transforms paint into image, illuminating the tension between the prosaic material world and the poetic immaterial world, as well as the transformation of action into thought. For Sunny, this act of instinctively utilizing the physicality of paint on canvas synthesizes memories, relationships and emotions, and links the material towards the metaphysical.
In Sunny’s works, the repetitive layering system interweaves color to create a cohesive composition comprised of depth and an ostensibly calculated order amidst the organic chaos. Her language of abstraction exists in a contingent framework that explores the inherent, deconstructed nature of being and the multiplicity and the mutability of perceptions. Although her practice continues the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, the use of nail art, crystal beading, embroidery and scrap booking embellishments in the work express her ambivalence towards the “feminine” – such as domestic chores, hobby art and fashion. Behind the seducing jewel tones and iridescent lure, the wrought surfaces of the paintings portray a dislocated identity, embellished with distracting, decorative objects.
This exhibition of her paintings presents an illusion of an existence disengaged from material embodiment, where material appearance becomes infused with spiritual enlightenment through use of light. The exhibition space will provide an illusory experience that challenges sensory perception. It hopes to engage the viewer to question the momentary coalescing of qualities that are inherently complex and unstable: perception, reality, memory and meaning.
