DUSSELDORF.- Beck & Eggeling presents at the start of the autumn season the exhibition “Mulberry Mindscapes“ by the Korean artist Kwang Young Chun. The opening will take place on Friday 4th September 2015 at 6 pm at Bilker Strasse 5 & 4-6 in Duesseldorf, on the occasion of the gallery weekend 'DC Open 2015'. The artist will be present.
Kwang Young Chun is considered to be a contemporary master working with paper and is widely recognized for his installations and three-dimensional reliefs. Beck & Eggeling presents the Korean artist for the very first time in Germany with his newest works from the series Aggregation.
Meticulously, Chun creates distinctive surface textures by wrapping hundreds of handmade triangles of styrofoam into Korean Mulberry paper printed with Korean characters and and fixing them onto canvas. He thus creates three-dimensional wall art with a sculptural potential. The silk paper which the artist reclaims from old books and magazines retains its original character through the Korean lettering and often is pigmented with natural colours from fruit, flowers, earth or tea. These astounding creations fuse together in coloured waves and corrugations, rising and falling before the eye of the observer and evoking associations with surface textures and aerial views of natural phenomena - such as undulating flower nurseries, the desert or cratered landscapes or even the scarred moonscape. Subtly and accurately moulded, Chun’s works are the result of greatest diligence and extreme precision. The visitor here has the opportunity to experience the self-contained balance and distinctive peace immanent in Chun’s works.
Reduced to the simplest of materials, the artist expresses aspects of human existence through his universal and contemporary pictorial language while at the same time his oeuvre also conveys an idiosyncratic Korean sense for culture and tradition. This ability to communicate with such an individual pictorial language while at the same time being conscious of his South Korean origins ultimately characterizes the decisive moment in Chun’s international career which began in 1995 and was initiated by a childhood memory. This memory of his uncle, a practicing doctor who hung his medicinal herbs wrapped in Mulberry paper closely from the ceiling, inspired Chun to employ this traditional Mulberry paper to be found in every household as artistic material for his creative work.
Kwang Young Chun was born in 1944 in Hongcheon County in South Korea. Numerous works by Kwang Young Chun are presented in public collections such as the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum London, Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington D.C., United Nations in New York, National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Seoul Museum of Art, National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, and others. The artist has won many art prizes and awards and was nominated artist of the year 2001 by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea. In 2009 he received the Presidential Prize in the 41st Korean Culture and Art Prize from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in Seoul. Kwang Young Chun lives and works in Boondang-gu, South Korea.
