Heemin Chung in Folding Acts Group Exhibition at Coreana Museum of Art
Folding Acts is a curated exhibition originating from the inquiry of 'Museum as Laboratory', the thematic focus of the Coreana Museum of Art's multidisciplinary arts programme, *c-lab 9.0. Bringing together the works of three of the most compelling artists in the current visual and multidisciplinary arts in Korea—Heemin Chung (painting, sculpture, video), Yunjung Lee (performance, wall drawing, video), and Sungoo Im (drawing, installation)—this exhibition represents a definitive attempt to manifest the concept of the 'Museum as Laboratory'. It redefines the museum not merely as a space for display, but as a 'site of experimentation' where bodily contemplation is generated.
This exhibition reflects the museum as a vibrant field of practice where thought emerges through the body. Here, the body, image, and material serve not as mere vehicles for fixed meanings, but as conditions for action that test and transform one another. The exhibition extends the interpretation of 'performativity' beyond the confines of performance art, identifying it as a fundamental principle that permeates the entirety of drawing, painting, installation, video, and archive.
The featured artists adopt the ‘body’ as a vessel for thought and a tool for forging connections, demonstrating in their distinct ways how repetitive movements and meticulous processes culminate in a finished work.
Heemin Chung translates digital imagery into the lexicon of painting and sculpture, exploring the inherent potential and sensory depth of material. Her work weaves a visual narrative of the traces that digitality leaves upon the individual’s physique and psyche, metaphorically unveiling the intricate rapport between technology and emotion, image and materiality. Navigating between digital devices and the canvas, and shifting seamlessly from 3D modelling to artisanal craftsmanship, Chung continues her experimentation with texture and volume. Through this approach, she reconstructs familiar genres—such as landscape and still life—into a poetic language, giving form to the rhythms of the body, the sensibilities of the city, and the everyday sensations permeated by technology. Utilising images sourced online alongside digital modelling software, the artist creates three-dimensional sketches, which are subsequently printed and materialised through transparent gel mediums to form delicate membranes. These materials—fragmented, pleated, and draped—cascade over canvases or steel structures, settling upon the surface as a resonance of objects replicated as images.
In this exhibition, Heemin Chung captures the landscape of dusk—the moment of the day’s most dramatic transformation—intertwining the passage of time with the visual image through newly unveiled sculptures. Furthermore, in her latest series of paintings, she perceives a profound sense of transition by meticulously reconstructing fractured fragments of floral imagery.
