11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

‘Knocking Air’ (installation view, Barakat Contemporary, Seoul) 2020 / Image courtesy: The artist and Barakat Contemporary / Photograph: Jeon Byung Cheol NOTES 1 ‘Interview: Chung Seoyoung at Barakat Contemporary’ [video], Barakat Contemporary , Seoul, 2020, <barakatcontemporary.com/ video/5/>, viewed March 2024. 2 Jung-Ah Woo, ‘Chung Seoyoung’ [exhibition review], Art Forum , 2020, <artforum.com/ events/chung-seoyoung-247240/>, viewed March 2024. BORN 1964, SEOUL, SOUTHKOREA LIVES+WORKS INSEOUL Chung Seoyoung is recognised for her use of non‑traditional materials, her investigations of the relationship between language and art, and her sensitivity to social divides in the face of rapid economic and cultural change. Above all, she is respected for her commitment to a generous — if somewhat unconventional — conception of sculpture. Chung’s sculptures are frequently described as strange, cryptic and uncanny, partly because they elude easy readings — the artist has long resisted what she describes as the ‘semiotic interpretation of art’ — but also because of the way their texture and scale create associations with the anthropomorphic or other everyday forms. Language has been part of this matrix since the outset of Chung’s practice, and she employs decontextualised words, phrases and orthographic marks alongside considered material choices and laborious handiwork, which take on sculptural aspects of their own. The artist describes seeking ‘wrong combinations when word meets word’, and the ‘autonomous, independent world created by the movement of language and speech’. 1 These strategies align with a broader sense of absurdism in her practice that has been interpreted as both an expression of irony and a distaste for authoritarianism. Chung’s ‘text drawings’ are enigmatic, fragmentary sentences handwritten in pencil on sheets of roughly A4-scale that are cast in bone china clay and poised atop oversized plinths in subtly different shades of white, which, from a distance, read as a cluster of minimalist cubes. Written in mutually unintelligible languages, the text drawings appear both determinedly geometric, drafted with the aid of a ruler, and haphazard, with sections smudged or erased with a wash of water. They read as short poems — charming and nonsensical — incorporating deliberate linguistic slippages, mistranslations and obfuscations. ‘A hole / Free / Free and happy / A big hole / A bigger hole’, reads one in English, its absurdity echoed by another in Korean: ‘Removing its nose as it flies through space’. Others are curiously descriptive, such as (in English): ‘A tiger only in half / A palm tree upside down’, and the Korean, ‘This garden sealed with four walls / With thorns / Purple flowers / Very high plants’. One, in Chinese characters, reads simply, but expansively, ‘World’. Accompanying them is Blood, flesh, bone 2019, created from an assemblage of wooden offcuts and a stray branch that converge in a circular panel into which are carved the words of the title. Though fragmented, the words and phrases in this set of drawings are not without origin, many having first appeared in Chung’s sound installation The Nap 2014. For that work, the artist invited a group of musicians to improvise speech and sounds over the course of two days, as they wandered in a historical section of the Korean Demilitarised Zone, the buffer zone dividing North and South Korea. In this context, the fragments take on a fearful power. As art critic Jung-Ah Woo has observed: ‘despite their initial inscrutability, these words certainly refer to the uncanny reality that exists within the borderland’. 2 Even their inscrutability seems appropriate. Chung’s charmingly absurd broken phrases present a material reality and a sense of freedom far preferable to the terrible absurdities that have riven the world, and which continue to keep it divided. For Chung Seoyoung, the sign in Blood, flesh, bone refers to the basic sculptural materials that comprise human life. It is also a reminder of the stakes involved in such absurd arrangements of the world, when blood, flesh and bone could so readily aspire to be ‘free and happy’ — like a hole. REUBENKEEHAN CHUNGSEOYOUNG ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 78 — 79