Heemin Chung Artists to Watch

By Margaret Carrigan

At the core of Heemin Chung’s conceptual practice is a captivation with perception and how technology can both expand and limit what we see. Yet as more aspects of our lives move online, the Seoul-based artist attempts to draw the digital domain back into the analog world. 

Using digitized images as a starting point, Chung creates densely layered paintings with a signature semiopaque gel. The membrane-like sheets form haunting, sculptural shapes and landscapes that evoke a sense of loss. The thin veils of acrylic capture sensory ruptures—or “errors,” as she puts it—that are established by the increased replication of the material world in pixels.

“Digitality enables us to explore realms that we cannot physically access and offers an endlessly expanding world,” states the artist. However, it is also superficial, and our bodily senses are rendered obsolete. There is “a paralyzed sense of time,” she says, with no past, no future, essentially an infinite existence.

Chung’s abstracted canvases have yielded a dedicated following in her native South Korea, and over the past few years, her work has been shown widely in the region, including at the 2022 Busan Biennale, the Doosan Art Center, and the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art. In 2023, Thaddaeus Ropac began representing the artist, bringing her oeuvre to the international stage for the first time at the gallery’s Art Basel Hong Kong booth earlier this year.