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〈Not Done Yet or Never〉, Acrylic, oil, and gel medium on canvas 235×310cm, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform

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Worlds that are out of touch and cannot blend in coexist in CHUNG Heemin’s work. Such worlds are times or dimensions set apart, as well as elements that conflict in terms of the medium or expression. These contradictory and conflicting terms deviate from their existing context and are newly overlapped, arranged and confronted through the artist. However, the outcome of such encounter continues to affirm that they cannot come together as one state and thus prolong loneliness, or ultimately amplify the conflict. Despite so, the artist combines such worlds onto one screen. Thus, her efforts are close to a sorrowful process of re-confirming the impossibility, like Rebecca HORN’s work in which the elongate fingers she wears on both arms attempt to caress, at once, two sides of the wall that can never be touched at once. Reminiscent of HORN’s pitiful attempts,¹⁾ tied up in the situation regardless of her desperate efforts to overcome limitations, what is the world that the artist, with her arms as widely open as possible, trying to embrace all at once?

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〈A Portrait of a Drenched Dog〉, Acrylic, oil, and gel medium on canvas 182×182cm, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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The Bodiless Image
Thinking about it, artists have never been able to possess anything. They would merely believe that they did, or use solid support as a replacement that could console them, and put on an image that they created. Thus, the image has never had a body; it would just be put on a new support each time, through a different method. But if this old practice would sadden the artist, probably because we live in the present era when we come to always acknowledge the fact that the image is an empty shell.

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The world revolves around its future-oriented goals of advancement, and our hands increasingly grope about in the air. The support has gone beyond flatness to being transparent, and makes us unable to deny the fact that the image has no physical body that can support itself. On the surface of her work, the artist overlaps the immaterial image which explicitly exists in this age, and her deliberation and pity about her position as an artist who still creates the image as a tangible material.
The material and immaterial coexist in her work. Mainly taken from 3D Warehouse, the artist’s subjects are empty yet take on descriptive shape and skin. The artist portrays these subjects with acrylic on canvas with least bit of distortion, in the flattest way possible, then tops it off with atypical material lump of gel medium. In such paintings presented in her 2018 solo exhibition UTC-7:00 JUN 3PM, On the Table at Kumho Museum of Art, such lumps merely played the role of stains. The blunt lump placed on the flat smooth image stir up noise on the surface of the work like some debris, and is akin to a moment of awakening which makes a temporary emergence in a world that’s losing its depth.

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On the other hand, the artist’s 2019 solo exhibition An Angel Whispers (P21, Seoul) may be closer to being a consolation for the image without a body, or the artist’s confession of her lingering desires for tactile experiences. Like the title of the exhibition, which is based on the story about an angel who gives up eternity in order to be able to ‘touch’ the one he loves²⁾the artist assigns tactility to subjects that she wishes to embrace. And so the thick gel medium placed on top of depthless image becomes the temporary body for the aimlessly wandering images to linger.

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〈In Its Integrity〉, Acrylic, gel medium, and inkjet print on canvas, 27×35cm, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform

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Combination of Abstract and Figurative
The artist’s works, with mixed material and immaterial, are charged with a sense of abstraction. However, one can’t just assert her work as being abstract, because there are also images with abstract forms, which can more reasonably be taken as being concrete and figurative. She continuously and frequently observes and brings her subjects from the SketchUp program. The digital mock-up images that she sees are the most pathetic beings whose existence is based on the premise of eventual disposal, created with the minimum elements one can ‘feel’ as real in the virtual space-time. Therefore, the artist brings the emptiness, coldness and loneliness of these beings into her surface. The subjects that she brings from the web space, in many of her works including UTC-7:00 JUN 3PM, On the Table, are randomly placed and overly magnified. While the excessively amplified subjects take off from a familiar perspective and are expressed in a state of non-gravity and unfathomable sense of scale, the surface that’s faithfully emulated with air spray still concretely exists. However, each object with this specificity situates itself as an abstract figure that compactly demonstrates the pitifulness of the immaterial image, rather than interpret or explaining the content.

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On the other hand, there are also works by the artist which are abstract in terms of formality, but are justifiably more representational. An example is the series of works shown in her solo exhibition An Angel Whispers, which shed light on the expanding desires for touch in contrast to the virtuality of the digital image. For instance, The Portrait of a Drenched Dog (2019) is not a portrait of a dog which the artist abstracted, but a reproduction of the image that popped up in her head. It’ closer to being a reproduced image that projects an image of the digital age, an existence that’s lost its identity, like something drenched and melting down.

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〈An Angel Whispers #5〉, Acrylic, oil, and gel medium on canvas, 41×32cm, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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However, they are strictly separated, or remain undefined and coexisting. The images that fill Erase Everything But Love (2018) and May Your Shadow Grow Less (2018) are both abstract and representational. Everything is scattered and dispersed like debris, like an unorganized screen. Most of the images with concrete surfaces are torn or broken, the whole form is covered into another form and is threatened of its reproducibility, and even the gel medium at the very top oscillates between being atypical and typical. The artist’s work, neither abstract nor figurative because they’re so combined, seems to shed a frank view on the identity of the image today; no matter how hard it tries to capture something, it just keeps on failing. It lingers in the world as an image itself, not as real nor fictional, neither abstract nor figurative, in a state that’s like a fragment and easily overlooked.

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Installation view of 《An Angel Whisper》 (P21, Seoul, 2019). Image provided by Incheon Art Platform

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The Light in Between
How can the artist hold together, in one surface, these scattering fragments, the pieces that float around unimpacted by force of gravity, and the images roaming around without any support? The answer might be ‘light’ When she began to see SketchUp as a world of its own, the ‘virtual light’ in this world was always a mechanism that powerfully influenced her. Anyone who lives on earth cannot be exempt from the invariable truth that we all share one light source: the sun. However, light completely irrelevant to earth exists in SketchUp. The presence of light, which illuminates indiscriminately everywhere in the virtual space according to the set value of angle and intensity, became a reason for the artist to acknowledge this virtual space as a world of its own.
The artist put light behind her work in the group exhibition Snow Screen (Archive Bomm, Seoul) in 2017. The materiality of the paper disappears in the part where light nears it, leaving vague traces of the artist’s brush strokes. When the paper as the support becomes transparent, we witness the barely surviving image in a state that’s neither material nor immaterial. Thus, for her, light is something that infiltrates gaps, fuse two separated parts together or take them apart, and is the grounds for the existence of this world, as well as a mechanism through which we recognize the world.

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Light and shadow became part of the work/ exhibition in her exhibition On Vacation (Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2019). This is a gesture that declares the fact that not only the canvas but the light that shines between it and space can be a support on which her image sits. The image still wanders, without a solid body, and light is what the artist has chosen to use in order to seize this image. Shadow, even weaker than light, is hopeless and hopeful at the same time. Light can make its subject both transparent and opaque. It can limit the vision of the one looking, or even blind them. It can also make one look far, very thoroughly. What’s for certain, however, is that even when it meets darkness and seems to flicker, it will linger on. Thus, light may be able to embrace, albeit loosely, the fragments of isolated worlds.

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¹⁾ Scratching Both Walls at Once (1974-5) by Rebecca HORN (b.1944). In 1970s, Rebecca HORN presented performances that attempted to overcome the vulnerability and limitation of human by confining or extending the body. HORN wore finger extensions measuring over 1.5m, attempting to touch two walls facing each other in one space at once. This work might have conjured up in my mind because of the text Spider Woman, written by the art critic KIM Hongki on CHUNG Heemin’s work.

²⁾ The film Wings of Desire, 1987

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※ This content was first published in 『2019 Incheon Art Platform Residency Program Cataloge』, and re-published here with the consent of Incheon Art Platform

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