January 28 - March 16, 2022
Rimm Chae & Kwang Young Chun
Earthly Landscapes: Nostalgia and Prophecy
37-39 Clinton St NEW YORK
ABOUT
New York, NY- Space 776 is pleased to present a duo exhibition featuring works by Rimm Chae and Kwang Young Chun.
The mountainous landscapes spanning across China and Korea are an understated wonder with fundamental components that contribute to a unique regional aesthetic with a particular exotic mystique. Rimm Chae's art attracts great attention for her elegant handling of lacquer and meticulous processes associated with jewelry design. With a career spanning over twenty years, Chae Rimm draws inspiration from both scenery and memory. She experiments with Eastern philosophies regarding humanity and natural cycles and explores the harmony of the two. Her new body of work, "Lacquered Landscapes," from the series Mountains and Islands, features a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, and jewelry. In this body of work, fraught with intense color and simplified lines, Chae Rimm interprets natural processes of transformation expressed by mountains and islands over time.
Rimm relies on techniques she perfected as a jewelry designer to embrace three-dimensional art with confidence. Rimm Chae's art implements lacquer, a durable material traditionally associated with everyday use, as well as opulent jewelry-making techniques. With an artistic process that generates unique textures and aesthetic motivations, Rimm Chae’s art becomes a class of its own—a 'hybrid aesthetic' that blurs the line between functional and decorative art.
Chun Kwang Young’s work showcases his formal training in Abstract Expressionism. He seamlessly references a continuum in which the organic past and cognitive present thrive contemporaneously. Inspired by his childhood memories of Korean medicine boxes, Chun Kwang Young creates mountainous forms that allude to natural processes of transformation. His geometric compositions are adorned with educational and philosophical texts that offer a prophetic, even post-apocalyptic interpretation of the coexistence of intellectual progress and human contamination.
After working primarily in earth tones at the beginning of his career, Chun Kwang Young began to experiment with vibrant colors such as black, blue, red, and orange. Aggregation 16 - AP003 (2016) features pages from primary school textbooks, some predating the Korean War. Dyed with natural ingredients such as gardenia seeds and teas, these textbooks commemorate a period of educational humanism in Korea. The bold burnt-orange seen in this work marks an important new chapter in Young's artistic canon, yet maintains his career-long philosophy: "To me, the triangular pieces wrapped in mulberry paper are basic units of information, the basic cells of a life that only exists in art, as well as in individual social events or historical facts. By attaching these pieces one by one to a two-dimensional surface, I wanted to express how basic units of information can both create harmony and conflict. This became an important milestone in my long artistic journey to express the troubles of a modern man who is driven to a devastated life by materialism, endless competition, conflict, and destruction. After almost twenty years, I was now able to communicate with my own gestures and words." -Chun
SELECTED IMAGES
INSTALLATION VIEWS
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Chae, Rimm (b. 1963) received the Leonardo Da Vinci Award in Florence, Italy. Her works of art were also accepted and exhibited at the Start Art Fair held at London’s Saatchi Gallery in 2017. She became the first Korean to win the SOLO Award at the Artexpo New York. The
International André Malraux Association also awarded her at the International Cultural Heritage Fair held in Paris. She has successfully held numerous solo exhibitions in Seoul, New York, and Paris. Her artwork has also been well-received at leading art fairs in Miami, Barcelona, Singapore, Cologne, Taipei, London, Brussels, and Toulouse.
Chun, Kwang Young (b. 1944) studied at Hong-Ik University in Korea and received his MFA from the Philadelphia College of Art. Prior to 1995, when the artist began working with mulberry paper, he painted in a manner influenced by American and European Abstract Expressionism. Chun has been named Artist of the Year by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul and was awarded the Presidential Prize in the 41st Korean Culture and Art Prize by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. In 2014, Chun authored Mulberry Mindscapes, a monograph articulating the breadth and diversity of his half-century-long artistic career. The artist’s works are in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Seoul National University Museum of Art, and the Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, among others. He lives and works in Seoul, South Korea.