Heemin Chung The Week reviews an exhibition in a private gallery

'It's difficult to sum up what makes the paintings of Korean artist Heemin Chung (b.1987) quite so spectrally beautiful. Hewn from a distinctive combination of acrylic paint, printed imagery and sheets of gel that harden into waves of cloudy, 3D relief, they resemble organic matter - say, the shredded body of a transparent sea mollusc - as much as they evoke decades-old plastic detritus. Here, cascades of synthetic material shroud undercoats of dirty North Sea grey and congealed-blood reds. The forms on display in UMBRA are based on digital photographs of street junk the artist has encountered walking around her hometown, Seoul: a city she believes has already embraced a frightening future in which technology has - in her words - completely altered its inhabitants' "relationship with space and time", with life increasingly experienced through the prism of a screen. With this in mind, the already arresting compositions take on an altogether more elegiac quality: the effect is haunting.'