Chong Gon Byun's Cabinet of Wonders

Lilly Wei, Independent Curator

Korean-born artist Chong Gon Byun's modest Brooklyn apartment looks deceptively ordinary from the outside but inside is another matter. A Wunderkammer of sorts, the walls of the approximately 850-square foot combined residence and studio are entirely lined with shelves and cabinets stuffed with books and objects of every description. As for the remaining floor space, it, too, is almost completely occupied. African and Oceanic masks and totems, skulls, musical instruments, ornate frames, mirrors, images and replicas of Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, reproductions of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, his Last Supper and esoteric 17th century Italian paintings bump up against globes of the world, plastic fruits and flowers, stuffed parrots, metallic insects, lamps, vintage appliances, springs, coils, manikin heads and bodies as well as found memorabilia such as old photographs and much more in a madly eclectic, neatly arranged mix that also includes standing sculptures of sweet-faced Christs, Virgin Marys, golden Buddhas and a fleet of small to large model airplanes suspended from the ceiling. Byun's trove is an artwork in its own right but it also provides the inspiration and raw materials for his projects. From this obsessive accumulation of rescued discards and objects acquired at auctions, flea markets and antique shops, Byun constructs his signature assemblages.
The artist, who is reconciled with his native Korea and shows there often to much acclaim, said that when he first arrived in New York in 1980 as a political refugee, he was very poor but he reveled in his sense of personal liberty and was ecstatically happy; it was paradise to him. Byun was often too poor to buy food and certainly could not afford art supplies but soon discovered that, unlike the Korea of his youth where everything was repaired and re-used, in America almost everything was thrown away. While he found-and still finds-the practice disturbing, he was nonetheless deeply grateful. The streets became his supplier, his muse. Trained as a painter in Korea, he was not familiar with mixed media but here, what began in necessity soon became a passion.
Byun ingeniously combines art and politics, art and text, art and fashion, art and religion as he blithely hybridizes mediums and appropriates iconic images from art history, the culture at large and his personal experience. He pointedly refers to and sends up Dadaist and Surrealist tropes and tangles with Duchamp in a deliberate, determinedly

retro discourse. He cobbles together his found objects, then alters them to tweak their meaning, his methods a variation of the intricate, handcrafted production of many young artists today. Trained as a realist painter-he is a master-Byun also paints sections of his assemblages with landscapes, cityscapes and other scenes, some copies of famous paintings like Brueghel's Tower of Babel. Violins appear frequently in his oeuvre and he, like Man Ray-whom he acknowledges in works such as Memory of Man Ray-appreciates the instrument's similarity to a voluptuous female body, another recurrent motif.
Frames for Byun have a particular meaning, associated with family portraits and photographs and his work is often enclosed by dark, beautifully polished wood frames or elaborately gilded ones that are architectural in profile, suggesting, at times, the gates and towers of a royal domain. Metaphorically, the frames outline and define a space reserved for fantasy and memory, much in the way Joseph Cornell's boxes contain and memorialize his delicately crystalline fantasies. Some of Byun's reveries are almost as delicate but, more often, his space is allotted to the antic and robust, his sense of theatre ruled by comedy rather than tragedy. There is a darker side to his humour, as seen in his Piet? which quotes Michelangelo but presents the dead Christ as Superman and in his image of a Buddha seated on a balance, opposed by a skull which tips the scale downward. Yet in his hit-and-run critique of Western civilization, with its mania to produce and consume, its materialism and waste, its loss of spirituality, Byun is not unrelenting. He is homo ludens, a natural bricoleur, an enthusiastic producer of the reclaimed and re-cycled, an artist more than a partisan. He also likes to concoct amusing trifles, attaching, for instance, a tiny, mass-produced figure of Marilyn Monroe in her classic pose from The Seven Year Itch atop a whirring fan, creating a false causality between the plastic-and therefore fixed-upwardly billowing white dress and the real breeze from the fan. . Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Jesus and the Buddha are important subjects to him but, ultimately, he allows his objects to dictate the meaning, always more complex and far-ranging than agit-prop. Byun is not a hagiographer but a happy satirist, a cosmopolitan subversive-which is his strength-his eccentric, inventive assemblages a sly amalgam of the sacred, the profane and the political, the delightfully nonsensical and the soberingly real.