Chung Seoyoung Solo Exhibition: The Speed of the Large, the Small, and the Wide This fall, the Ilmin Museum of Art will present a solo exhibition of contemporary artist Chung Seoyoung, The Speed of the Large, the Small, and the Wide. Chung was at the forefront of the artists whose work truly began to show the symptoms of change in South Korean contemporary art in the early 1990s, and she has been consistently working in varied genres including sculpture, installation, drawing, and performance to create a body of work that reveals the underlying thought and reflection behind form. For this exhibition, the artist has attempted to overcome the limitations of sculpture through a body of work that raises the fundamental, epistemological question of what it means to create work as a sculptor. This is, one could say, the politics that Chung reveals through what is often considered a traditional genre. An Epistemological Approach to the Being of Sculpture.
In addition to sculpture, the artist also uses other genres and media to investigate and give form to the idea of a “sculptural dimension.” The 16 works featured in this exhibition include video installation, drawing, photo collage, and sound-based performance. One of the artist’s previous works, the performance The Adventure or Mr. Kim and Mr. Lee from a 2010 project at the LIG Arthall, will be reconstructed and installed as a three-channel film in the first floor exhibition hall. Though diverse, all of the questions investigated by these works present us with the artist’s ruminations on matters of sculpture. This is also what the exhibition’s title, The Speed of the Large, the Small, in the Wide implies. This is a vague phrase, through which it is difficult to clearly judge how large, small, or wide; or how fast or slow the speed; or indeed what kind of physical or imaginary motion is being described in the first place. However, we can understand that the phrase indicates a situation in which the physical dimension of some object or thing of a certain size and shape is moving, either slowly or quickly. Thinking about this in the context of the artist’s work, one might say that this is situation implied by the speed of creating—that is, the situation and moments of bringing a sculpture into existence. Unlike the genres of film or performance-which employ time, sound, and movement and whose nature is dynamic and immaterial-sculpture is by nature quiet and physical. However, there is another dimension of sculpture that challenges this “nature”; this dimension appears in the ontological time of sculpture, the moment of sculptural performance, and the process of cognizing the physical world of sculpture. It is in this dimension of sculpture that we find the duration of indecisive time involved in sorting through a sculpture’s small elements and details and considering the relationships among them. This is a spatial world imbued with an exciting tension that oscillates between tranquility and motility.
Thus, even though Chung has expanded into performance, sound installation, and text drawing over the past several years, these diverse methods ultimately continue to construct the artist’s idiosyncratic sculptural language and the epistemological domain of her sculptural world. This exhibition not only seeks to introduce the profound and purposeful work of Chung Seoyoung, unbound by the limitations of genre, but also to show its singular aesthetic materialization.
*image (left)
Night and Day 2, 2013
mirror, chair, 220x210x2
© Seoyoung Chung
Courtesy of Ilmin Museum of Art
