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Solo Exhibition
painting itself

May 19 - June 25, 2016, GALLERYEM, Seoul, South Korea

전시명 : painting itself

2016년 5월 19일(목) ~ 6월 25일(토)

오프닝: 5월 19일(목) 5pm

시간: 월–금 10:00am~6:30pm, 토요일&공휴일 10:00am~6:00pm, 일요일 휴관

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Gallery EM is pleased to present a renowned Dusseldorf-based Korean artist Sen Chung’s Painting Itself from May 19th to June 25th. This is Chung’s third exhibition at Gallery EM.

Chung’s oil paintings are known for their unique drawing or watercolor-like sensibility. Through his uniquely dreamlike and abstract images, Chung unveils “painterly approaches of aesthetical interpretations in a contemporary way.” In this exhibition, the artist presents 25 new abstract paintings that emphasize basic painterly elements such as lines, planes, and colors.

Using these basic elements, Sen Chung visualizes not only the personal emotions he feels from being in unfamiliar places, but also dichotomies related to emotion and rationality, East and West, and external and internal among others. Due to the fact that the paintings are visually expressed based on the artist’s abstract thoughts and emotions, his new paintings appear as riddles with more challenging answers than his previous paintings. Thus, the viewer becomes absorbed in meditation searching for answers to the riddles. Chung used geometric images, including squares and circles in most of his recent paintings, which represent the visual components for ‘contemplative deposits,’ according to the artist. If the squares and the circles represent the universe of the artist’s innermost thoughts, then the figurative elements occasionally appearing, such as birds, horse, mountains and trees, play the role of a messenger that questions the natural world or the object of a universe.

In his new paintings, the artist filled each canvas with rough graffiti-like lines in addition to the geometric and static elements expressed in restrained lines and planes. These express the balance between emotional and rational. Through the geometric, abstract elements that quietly float within the square frames of a canvas, the artist emphasizes the indirectness of expression and ambiguity that are influenced by personal boundaries. In so doing, Sen Chung unfolds his ongoing personal research on ‘painting aesthetics’ or ‘aesthetic judgements’ in terms of contemporary viewpoint.

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