Chung Seoyoung: With no Head nor Tail

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to announce Chung Seoyoung (b. Seoul, 1964)’s With no Head nor Tail, from March 21 to April 20, 2024. This marks the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery since 2017. In a 1996 interview, shortly after Chung’s artistic career began, she described her work as the “reciprocal motion between the unreal and real, the abstract and concrete.”^[1] This description, which diverges from our conventional understanding of sculpture, suggests that sculpture for Chung is an articulation of the negative spaces in between the beliefs and notions that we have come to recognize and categorize. With no Head nor Tail presents works from a transitional phase in Chung’s practice, re-examining the medium of sculpture from “all possible conditions of reference,”^[2] including objects, time, space, text, sound, and the viewer’s body in motion.

Many of Chung’s motifs often depict moments where abstract concepts intersect with ephemeral forms, such as ghosts, waves, and fires. The title of this exhibition seeks to evoke with a touch of humor the essence of a ghost – its shape constantly shifting, unable to be pinned down through language. Included in With no Head nor Tail will be early works from the 1990s where Chung has utilized everyday objects, to drawings that bridge the blindspots in perception through language and imagery. Furthermore, works that are composed of and keenly bring out the subtle innate qualities of materials that elicit memories of a certain socio-economical moment in Korea and references such as flooring decals, plastic, plywood, artificial plants, furniture, retro typefaces, bronze, and ceramics, culminate in what Chung denotes as “sculptural moments.”

Road (1993) and Sink (2011) are representative of works that Chung has composed with ordinary, commonplace objects. Originally exhibited at the abandoned substation in Singen, Germany, as part of the group exhibition Symposion Umspannwerk in 1993, Road consists of plastic buckets placed on wheeled legs, containing wooden balls with intersecting roads drawn on them. As suggested by the wheels and the round wooden balls, Road becomes a form representing continuous space and time, while the bucket serves as a container for these elements in motion. Another work that contains an everyday item is Sink (2011), which debuted at Apple vs. Banana, the artist’s solo exhibition held in a defunct model house in Seoul in 2011. Sink encourages a re-evaluation of familiar consumer goods and an examination of their already “known” appearances as if they were a blank canvas. For Chung, objects do not merely serve the function of creating sculpture. But rather, she seeks to bring out what has yet to be said about them – opening up other passageways that differ from and go beyond accepted and superficial points of view.

This exhibition presents an opportunity to engage with recent works that reveal the artist’s long-standing investigation of the relationship between language and perception. Deep Sea and Thick Wall (2024) is a standing sculpture composed of white panels silkscreened with text that reads: “staring into the deep sea and a thick wall is the same? the.” The text itself is written in typography reminiscent of South Korean grade school art classes in the 70s and 80s – a time when students had to create posters as part of the state-mandated collective social education curriculum. It is not that Chung seeks to align a “deep sea” and a “thick wall” as being the same, but rather that through sharing in the “act of looking,” she is able to mediate and erase the perceived boundary between the two. Another series with a prominent use of language is the A4-sized ceramic drawings. Some of them feature simple drawings made with gold glaze, while others have Korean characters that Chung inscribed using glaze pencils while using a ruler. Residual traces of pigment smudged by the ruler appear on the white, matte surface of the porcelain, evoking transience and ephemerality. Therefore, the consonants, vowels, words, and phrases appear like remnants of form and sound. Echoing Chung’s maxim – “When the object is cumbersome due to scale, I let drawing do the work” – the materiality of language is in a sense, an abstract sculpture.

Some senses are stronger than that of sight. Chung’s most recent work Red (2024) began with the artist’s vivid memory of encountering writer Charlotte Brontë’s dress displayed at the Morgan Library in New York. To be conceived as having belonged to a living person, the dress seemed too peculiar in size, thereby the experience generated a new relationship between the subject of the dress and the artist's body. This strange encounter lingered within the artist, creating an intense urge “to make something from what I've seen and what I know, but at the same time, has no meaning.”

Let us now recall the title of Chung's most recent retrospective, What I Saw Today (Seoul Museum of Art, 2022), which at first may sound unremarkable and detached. But Chung's decision to use the word “today,” rather than “yesterday” or “back then,” is significant because her sculptures aim to go beyond merely describing or representing past experiences in the present.^[3] Chung says, “For the past 4.5 billion years, the sun has visited us without fail, every single day of the year.”^[4] By situating her work alongside the sunrise, Chung evokes the continual passing of time, while still calling to mind that each sunrise is a new and unique event, because there will always be only one “today.” Essential to Chung’s sculpture is this heterogenous understanding of temporality that allows for the experience of simultaneity through time’s cyclical nature, while acknowledging time’s linearity. Still pertinent in 2024, Chung’s works capture this fleeting convergence where the subjective and the objective come together in time and space.