Our Budding Painting
There were times when a painting, the epitome of the classics, was excluded when talking about ‘contemporary art.’ However, standing in front of the paintings of these artists born in the 1980s, who are currently showing the most notable painterly journeys, one can still feel the profound and powerful resonance of the power of painting. They freely unfolded the plane of painting within the rectangular space of the canvas.
Heemin Chung (b. 1987)
Erase Everything but Love, 2019
Painting is a way to constantly ask myself existential questions in an increasingly dematerialised world.
As we live in the days when the word ‘digital’ is widely used as a representation of the times, we often fail to deeply contemplate the various layers of sensations that this word evokes. The act of viewing an image often refers to looking at an image beyond the screen. A lot of images remain with us as apparitions or afterimages long after the screen has been turned off. An artist is who spends a significant amount of time in the studio. If an enclosed studio is analogous to a vacuum, we only experience the external world through the screen of a phone and this works as a stimulus to recognise the subtle otherness that exists between me and the world.
Living in a world surrounded by digital devices, I, at times, feel a failure of communication between the physical reality and the reality with data. The melancholy it gives serves as the starting point for my work. When I spend a long time painting on canvas, there are moments when having a physical body feels like a limitation. For this, I often feel that the canvas and I have, and share the same fate.
— Heemin Chung
