Mary Stack on Sang-Hyun Chung

Sang-Hyung Chung, Whale Dreams, 2006; color on Korean paper.

Chung paints shapes and pieces them together as if he were working with mosaics, referencing historical cloth-making techniques and wrapping cloths to protect objects while traveling of his native Korea. Chung's mother was known for skillfully hand-sewing these precious fabrics together to create patchwork. Similarly, Chung's atmospheres present carefully painted patchwork patterns and reflect a customary familial practice in precision and attention to detail. His paintings display a definite mastery of material and medium.

Chung works on a thin but strong traditional Korean paper called Hanji made from the bark of the mulberry tree. Unlike most papers made from sodium hydroxide in Europe and the United States, Hanji is an all-natural paper resistant to fading and light damage. Mixing pigmented powders with boiling water and glue, Chung creates a type of paint commonly used in China, Japan, and Korea that translates loosely as “watercolor paint.” He builds the paint up in layers, up as many as 20. Only subtle the watermarks, rings, ripples, and cracks that later emerge are clues as to the medium.
Despite the time-consuming process that formulates Chung's imagery, his paintings do not read as obsessive compulsive or meticulous. Irregularity in the shapes and scale of the color blocks that compose his creatures reflect irregularities found in nature. Whisper in the Forest presents lines and rows of various star constellations and quilted owls, alternating one after the other to form a checker-like pattern. In other works, enormous whales float through sky and water.

As a student Chung loved biology and found solace in the mountains catching butterflies, birds, and small animals. His paintings involve nature but also reflect a childhood magic, conjuring fairytale and folkloric imagery. Dream of Whale in particular should be mentioned for its otherworldly qualities. A massive whale buoys beneath a hovering mass of sparkling gold fragments that remind one of the way light looks beneath a pool, slightly quivering and undulating. In the bottom right corner, what appears to be a tiny red lighthouse sits at the edge of a landmass. Yet all of this is submerged in a sea of blue and a horizon line at the far top that suggests an underwater world. Chung explained this painting as the representation of a whale's dream.

Citting Gauguin, Van Gogh, Mondrian, and Dali as favorites, Chung is familiar with European traditions as well as Korean. Traditional Korean quilt patterns, Van Gogh's starry nights, and Dali's barren dreamscapes are a few influences that echo throughout his work. Chung appreciates simplicity in form and color; earlier works are structured even more abstractly. In step with Mondrian he repeats, leaves, and comes back to forms. His patchwork pattern is involved in thirteen recent paintings from 2006, but appears in works tracing as far back as 2000.

Like Chung's demeanor, the work is involved yet reserved. In Korean culture, things are oftentimes meant to go unsaid, but importance is placed on the values of belief and confidence. Chung’s paintings silently, plaintively, express a drifting through a solitary fragmented existence. He explains, “When I see the stars in the sky my heart is comfortable." Perhaps it is these moments of mediation that piece us back together.