Noted Korean artist Kwang Young Chun, deeply immersed in the traditions and history of Korea, reveals his intense involvement with both Western art and the rich heritage of his homeland. Chun began his series Aggregation in the 1990’s. He is now internationally recognized for his sculptural and wall-relief forms. Chun uses elements made of small triangular Styrofoam wedges that he wraps in Korean mulberry paper, hand-ties with mulberry paper twisted into string and assembles into complex, large-scale works. The whole is an aggregate of its many parts. The paper is recycled from old books and wrappers of herbal medicines—a dominant feature that connects the artist to his past and the root of his cultural heritage.

See the exhibition at Hasted-Kraeutler through October 20th at 537 W 24th Street in Chelsea. Born in 1944 in Hongchun, Korea, Kwang Young Chun has exhibited internationally since 1966. He has gained international fame for his unique process of composing structures that consist of thousands of small triangles, each individually hand molded in paper. Young Chun gathers mulberry paper from old books of important Korean texts and dyes the papers into various shades with the help of teas and flowers. The small, minimalist pieces of mulberry paper are then attached one by one to a two dimensional surface, or built into free-standing sculptures that seem to tell of both distress and poetry. 

“Surface: die Posie des Materials” displays the work of Korean artist Chun Kwang Young (*1944) in Germany for the first time. Chun, whose artistic roots lie in abstract painting, critically tackles the expectations of traditional western painting. To do this, he uses antiquarian mulberry paper (Hanji) from Korea as the means to eliminate the conventional forms of painting. Since 1994, instead of working with a brush and paints, he has brought “aggregation” into his work: thousands of small, pyramid-shaped objects on the canvas, which are encased in mulberry paper printed with Korean and Chinese written characters. Because of the monochrome colouring and geometric image format, Chun’s works are assigned to the traditions of Minimalism and Colour Field Painting. However, the exhibition in the Kunstwerk museum hopes not to locate the works by the Korean artist explicitly in the context of Euro-American art history but rather to stimulate consideration of these through their juxtaposition with works by artists Gotthard Graubner and Anselm Kiefer. Whereas Chun has consistently dedicated himself to mulberry paper as his artistic medium, Gotthard Graubner (*1930) uses paint, the ancient, traditional medium of artistic material in all it attributes and colour effects. His so-called Cushion Pictures produce a sensual and graphic effect through multiple paint application on different fabrics. Unlike Graubner’s self-referential approach, the materials – lead, concrete, human hair and dried plants – in Anselm Kiefer’s (* 1945) epic works are a reference to historical and mythological subjects, memory and recollection.