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The Secret Lives of Objects: the work of Chong Gon Byun
Eleanor Heartney, Contributing Editor
American culture is notoriously a culture of obsolescence - the economy demands that new objects grow old quickly, necessitating their continual replacement by something even more new. But what happens to all those unwanted and discarded things? Usually they are disposed of in landfills or garbage dumps, more occasionally they are recycled, and in a few lucky cases they fall into the hands of sculptor Chong Gon Byun.
A native of Korea who grew up during the difficult years following the Korean War when nothing of potential value could be left unused, Byun continues to respect the secret lives of objects. For him, discarded window frames, old keys and obscure scientific instruments are not junk. They are carriers of their forgotten histories, and if he cannot restore them to their former glory, he can at least give them new life as part of a work of art.
Byun rescues family pictures which have been abandoned to thrift shops, he recovers quirky lamp stands and decorative bottles, violins and their cases; he saves elaborate picture frames and empty pedestals. These come home to his apartment/studio which bursts with the results of his salvage operation. Shoe horns, metronomes, the interior works of music boxes, taxidermied birds, doll furniture, and mannequin heads and limbs lie about on his shelves, floor and wall until they can be combined with other survivors into intriguing assemblage works. At times, his works bring to mind the gentle dream world captured within the fantasy boxes of Joseph Cornell. Other works are more jarring, suggesting a sharp social commentary more reminiscent of artists like Man Ray or John Heartfield. In yet other cases Byun's juxtapositions are deliberately humorous, recalling a Duchampian play with the disconnect between an object's shape and form and its literal "meaning." in an updating of Duchamp's famous mustached Mona Lisa, for instance, Byun gives us a reproduction of da Vinci's heroine equipped with an American Express card.
Byun has a particularly large collection of religious objects - crucifixes, statues of the Virgin Mary, Buddhas large and small - which reflect his double identity as a Korean born artist who has lived in the United States since 1980. These devotional items also provide some of his most potent subject matter. He uses them to create works which meditate on the uses and misuses of religion in contemporary society, the contradictions between spirituality and the relentless consumerism of American life, and the human longing for connections with a reality beyond the mundane world of everyday life.
Another recurring motif is the model airplane, which served Byun when he was younger as a symbol of freedom and escape. Now these machines sometimes carry more ominous overtones of military strikes and combat. Many works incorporate deliberate contradictions - as when love, death and religion are entwined in a work which presents a painted image of a nun and priest kissing before a sepia reproduction of an atomic cloud. Other works present provocative reinterpretations of familiar icons, as when a chipped reproduction of Michelangelo's Pieta presents the recumbent figure of Jesus in a Superman costume, suggesting a modernized version of his role as Savior of humankind. In another work Buddha's brain is being measured with a caliper while he cradles a small naked woman in his lap. This work offers a challenge to those seeking to follow Buddhism's teachings on the need to transcend desire.
With such works, Byun shows us the hidden souls of discarded objects. In the process, he encourages us to be less cavalier about history and memory. The past lives on into the present as long as we stay connected to the simple things which surround us.
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