RIDGEFIELD, CT.- The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to announce that noted Korean artist Kwang-Young Chun has created his largest free-standing paper sculpture to date—just over 14 feet and approximately 650 pounds—expressly for presentation in the Museum’s two story Project Space for his exhibition The Soul—Journey to America.

The exhibition will be on view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, located in Ridgefield, CT, through May 24, 2009.

Kwang-Young Chun makes intricate sculpture out of the recycled pages of old Korean books and medicine wrappers printed on mulberry paper. He wraps the handmade paper—inscribed with Korean characters—around thousands of Styrofoam tetrahedrons and other geometric forms that serve as the basic units of his compositions. The forms are then arranged in free-standing three-dimensional sculptures or mounted on the wall as two-dimensional low-reliefs. The new sculpture, which belongs to his Aggregation series, will be installed in the center of the gallery, offering visitors a holistic three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the piece, as well as a spectacular bird’s eye vantage from the Project Space balcony.

Curator Richard Klein says, “Chun has been influential to a younger generation of artists and successful in projecting traditional concerns to a broader, more international audience.” Klein continues, “Words become buried in Chun’s forms so that the work resembles organic forms that often grow up from the ground. These crystallized boulders and monumental pods with irregular surfaces reference the natural landscape, which is deeply imbedded in Korean art history, but are created from man-made modules made from both vintage and modern materials.”

Kwang-Young Chun was born in 1944 in Hongchun, Korea. He received his BFA from Hong-Ik University, Seoul, and his MFA from the Philadelphia College of Art. He was named Artist of the Year in 2001 by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, and he has exhibited widely in Korea and Japan.