Kwang Young Chun
Accumulations of Time and Space
By Eric Shiner

Korean artist Kwang-Young Chun creates other worldly composition that elicit ideas of primordial landscapes, obsessive accumulation and sculptural narrative. In their own way, Chun's large scale works become psychic archaeological sites or perhaps more clearly stated, records of the artist's history written large upon a plane of upheaval and ordered chaos. Made from traditional Korean mulberry paper printed with texts from historical Korean literature important to not only the artist, but to the entire cultural tradition of the Korean peninsula, Chun's physically complex yet philosophically balanced accumulations become documents of sorts, albeit with far-reaching implications.
Standing before these deeply intricate works, one's eyes first survey the jagged surfaces that Chun's angular form create. As the eye skims this conceptual landscape and the thousands of Chinese characters that play out upon it, it becomes apparent that text and space combine here, as though secrete messages have been twisted and formed around small triangular packages and applied to the surface of the work. Looking deeper into the crevices formed by the sheer abundance of these abutting shapes which seem to be the end result of an epic explosion of tectonic plates of the after effects of a powerful earthquake, one may envision dark abysses or caves that shelter the past, refusing to reveal the words hidden within. Of course, referencing art history, the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's accumulations come to mind here in terms of the obsessional repetition of similar forms, the coating of a surface with wrapped objects and the massive scale, yet Chun's creations are fully unique thanks to their hard edged crags that flaunt nature, just as they tend to mimic or long for it.
Now, turning to Chun's upbringing and the environment within which he was raised, much is to be gleaned from looking at the artist's youth in terms of the impact this period has made on his work. Chun's family owned a small herbal medicine shop in the countryside of rural South Korea, far from the bustling urban centers of Seoul or Pusan. Surrounded by nature - streams, forests, and rolling mountains in abundance - Chun seemingly absorbed the contours of the physical world around him, traces of which arise in his works, reminiscent as they are of Korea's most mountainous terrain. The exterior world may have given the artist ideas about the structure of his accumulations, but the interior world of his family's home gave it substance. For, in fact, the traditional Korean home in which Chun was raised was entirely covered in mulberry paper, one of the primary elements in Korean interior architecture and design.
From the walls to the floors to the doors to the windows, different grades and textures of mulberry paper covered most surface; further, household objects were often wrapped in the paper to protect them from mold or decay. Although the impact of being raised in this type of environment clearly effected Chun's art production, this fact is made more abundantly important when one learns that the traditional herbs that the family sold as their main source of income were wrapped, displayed and ultimately distributed in small triangular packages wrapped in mulberry paper. Hung from the rafters of the home's shop front and certainly throughout the entire structure, these small dangling packets of restorative ginseng and other sure-alls quite literally occupied the upper reaches of the young artist's environs as he played and traversed his paper-laden elixirs on its ear, reinterpreting and reformulating them into the central elements of his prolific body of work.
Turning back to the many literary passages that cover the entire surface of Chun's accumulations a nation's entire literary and intellectual history is inscribed across the picture plane of what might be termed the artist's narrative landscapes. From ancient philosophers to modern academics, the writers who Chun includes become his collaborators in a sense; their words and theories become part of his work, and further reflect the great weight he places on the concept of language as a tool of communication overall. For many viewers, the passages that Chun includes are inaccessible due to the implicit language barrier that arises if one is unable to read Chinese characters. Of course, for those able to decipher them, the work comes alive with the voices of hundred combined in a rich cacophony of academic and historical frenzy. And yet, even if one is unable to directly assess the messages and fractured sentences in Chun's work, a sense of harmony somehow arises from this otherwise chaotic mix of narrative profusion. It seems as though the thoughts of a nation are forced together into a single composition - that indeed Chun has created a most-contorted library that directly references the great minds and powerful words that both shaped and defined Korea for untold centuries.
And in many ways, Chun's rich constructs of forms and words are emblematic of Korea's own complex and at times violent history. Born in 1944, Chun was a child during the Korean War which was at its height from 1950 to 1953. Although the lulling countryside of his youth helped to inspire the geographic nature of his work's overall surface quality, the violence of the war no doubt became equally important to the artist's understanding of the world around him, and by extension, may be the ultimate source of Chun's fractured surfaces. With many of Korea's cities and towns decimated and scarred by the ravages of what, many aspects of the country's physical landscape became forever altered by the destructive force of bombs and bullets. Its is not too much of a leap to look at Chun's peaks and crevices as being representative of this charred and rubble-strewn landscape, and in his own poetic way, he brought a sense of calm and peace to an otherwise violent period in the country's history.
Returning to the formal qualities of the work, it is just that sense of beauty attained through the harnessing of chaos that becomes the artist's primary hallmark. For despite all of the instead ground that Chun's mulberry paper precipices hint at, the overall effect of the accumulations is one of tranquility and philosophical transcendence. Religious text speaking about Buddhism and native Korean shamanism no doubt find their way into Chun's selections, yet even without direct access to the language of such texts, there is something ethereal and sacrosanct present in the work. This, again, relates directly to Korean history, and indeed to the Korean landscape. If one were to visit for example, the ancient city of Kyongju in South Korea, one would find in addition to many historic temples, a mountain pathway dotted with centuries-old carvings of Buddha carved into cliff faces throughout the entire ascent to the mountain's peak. In Korea, religion encapsulates all aspects of life, far beyond the societal, reaching direction into the physical landscape. Taking this to its logical end, it becomes apparent that the religious thought of Korean all of the histories tied to that realm also find a voice in the conceptual mountains and valleys of Chun's very man-made structures.
It is also important to make conscious note of the fact that, due simply to the way that they are hung on a gallery wall, Chun's works become not horizontal landscapes as found in nature, but vertical depictions of a fully imagined universe that we may interact with face to face. By literally flipping the lush contours of his mindscapes - perhaps the best way to describe the work in a word - into this vertical arrangement, Chun disconnects his work from their geographical roots, almost telling the viewer that he or she must approach it as an equal. Man no longer emerges victorious over natural here he is on equal footing with it - he must engage with it, "read" it, and ultimately respond to it. By the very structure of the work, the viewer must survey the physical surface of the accumulations, as if mapping uncharted territory. Upon understanding the theoretical and historical underpinnings of the work vis-?-vis Chun and his native Korea, one must further reach into the entire make-up of not only an individual, but an entire nation. Not only do wisps of literature, political intrigue and a small child soaking in the minute details of his immediate environment find their way into the cracks of Chun's mulberry paper world, but so do our own imaginations seep into the mix as we relate to the work. For, despite all of their specific histories, words and undulating surfaces, Kwang-Young Chun's works speak to the universal conditions of life and all of the varied factors that they entail. For him - an indeed for us - his important body of work provides a most aesthetically pleasing doorway into the deep recesses of our minds and our spirits, of history and of humanity overall. Kwang-Young Chun builds structures that contort time and space in the here and now, and as a result, he achieves the all-too-rare ability to control his life through freezing chaos, statically and forever, in a place of ultimate beauty.