SITUATE / 6 March to 4 June 2017
SPARE ROOM / 14 July to 17 August 2017 (Opening 20 July 5-7pm)
Miok Chung is an artist from South Korea and a professor at the School of Art in Keimyung University (Daegu, Korea). She predominantly works as a painter with a focus on concepts of line and repetition.
I chose the line, one of the geometric formative means that does not leave any concrete clues on the surface, as a standard unit of my artwork in the early 2000s, and have repeated and built up my work in this area. Therefore, ‘line’ and ‘repetition’ can be regarded as the key concept of my artworks.
On the other hand, my artworks are the place where the languages of the geometric shapes that do not have a master can be found, or that have already been in the existing art history. In short, the geometric abstract form of Modernism or repetitiveness of Minimal arts and optical illusion of Op arts are the existing texts used in my artworks. However, the semantic forms of such existing texts are reorganized in my works through the interactions of involving, penetrating and mending. This is a new compilation, in which the essential attributes of the geometric shapes - hardness and stiffness - are fragmented. The attribute of illusion produced by this new compilation where the text named stripe is repeated at different angles, colors and levels with a subtle distinction gives a new meaning to my artworks. In other words, what I intended by realigning the texts was to reorganize the way the texts function with the attribute of play.
Ironically, what I wanted to reveal through this hard and cold language of geometric shapes was the imaginary illusion as the surface effect, and the play as an emotional code. The attributes of illusion and play are concepts that conflict with the geometric forms which have been perceived as solid, meaning that the geometric shapes are reconstructed into the flexible attribute through changes and reversals. This is re-contextualization of the semantic forms of the geometric shapes, which are fixated as rational codes, into the new emotional code that ‘shares meaning through fun’ by avoiding the fixation of semantic forms. Newly seeking the semantic forms of the geometric shapes is what I intend to realize through my artworks.
-Miok Chung, 2015