By Bansie Vasvani
These deliberately humble anti-forms recast as art owe a considerable debt to Fluxus and its integration of life and art. During her years living in Germany, the Korean- born Chung has developed an acute conceptual edge, moving beyond cultural and other narratives to explore the nature
of experience through the most minimal of means. One of the most important artists in the post-Dansaekhwa generation, she continues to push traditional boundaries by disconcerting standardized thought processes and forcing us to consider new ideas in art and life.
Chung was born in the ’60s, when Dansaekhwa’s approach to Minimalism and monochromatic art was taking shape, inspired by nature and the properties of materials, particularly soft ones. By the ’90s, conceptual art began to overtake both formal abstraction and the Minjung style of social realism, which dominated South Korea in the ’80s. While Chung was studying sculpture, Yong-Ik Kim’s non-What to make of large scrap-like pieces of metal strategically placed on the floor? Or a tabletop with a chunk cut out of the cor- ner? These questions come to mind as one searches for appropriate tools to assess Chung Seoyoung’s sculpture and multi- media work. Appropriately enough, such works emphasize the arbitrary and rootless nature of things. Chung also uses elements of the absurd to invest material objects with a sense of ambiguity...
