To follow the square forms in Sen Chung’s paintings is to allow for a quiet assimilation into the image. The recurring motif of squares in his works serves as a formal apparatus that explores the relationship between the imaginary and the reality of existence. The squares evoke the transitory service of a door or frame, closing a world while opening into another. Within the space of the square, form becomes a manifestation of freedom within discipline, change within stillness, and openness within closure.

​

Over the years, Chung has devoted his practice to formal and conceptual experimentation of painting, arriving at abstraction through an inquiry into beauty as form and the fundamental flatness of the medium. The process by which the artist’s inner world engages with the materialisation of form is abstracted and takes shape as an internal event in the canvas. Through its formal exploration, Beauty as Formalism traces the allegorical meanings beyond the visible through Sen Chung’s fifteen paintings created between 2023 and 2025. What follows addresses the questions that underpins Chung’s practice, exploring the essence and potential of the aesthetic decisions the artist makes. 

​

Significant Form 1

Clive Bell defines “significant form” as the particular arrangement and relationship of forms within an artwork that evokes an emotional response, what Bell called the “aesthetic emotion”. The term “significant form” refers to how individual formal elements interact in order for the viewer to produce an aesthetic emotion viewer, and does not refer to an overall appearance 

of an artwork. Here Bell describes that an artwork’s quality arises from relationships amongst its formal elements, rather than its representational content. Elements of line, color, shape, proportion, balance, rhythm, and spatial composition serve as parts that, once placed together, induce a complete viewing experience. 

​

Bell’s concept extends Immanuel Kant’s ideas about “purposiveness without purpose” from the Critique of Judgment. Kant's argument is that the judgment of beauty comes not from a utilitarian function but rather from a formal harmony that only appears to serve a purpose. In this sense, Kant shares Bell’s perspective that an artwork has no purpose external to its own aims. Instead, it generates pleasure through the self-contained logic of its completeness. Ultimately, for both Bell and Kant, the essence of art lies not in what it represents, but in how it exists. They saw art as an autonomous realm of form and the self-conscious acknowledgement of the emotions that emerge from experiencing it.

Bell’s “significant form” and Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose” provide an important framework for understanding Sen Chung’s work. Rather than foregrounding narrative or explicit themes, Chung reconstructs sensory order through the atmospheric interplay of color, form, texture, and space. Sen Chung's works– where forms are inseparable from the feelings lent to it– propose an autonomy of the aesthetic experience through formal ordering that transcends meaning. The viewer can be absorbed into the space composed by the artist. 

​

This exhibition unfolds across two gallery spaces on the ground floor and a fluid gallery space on the basement floor. Though varying in size, the paintings installed on the first floor all share a recurrent composition: a rectangular shape centrally positioned in the upper half of a vertical canvas. Through both its structural balance and collective display, these works centre around the motif of the square, their ordered patterns guiding the viewer’s perception and movement within the space. The viewers are free to assemble for themselves the relationships between the paintings. The works installed in the basement space contain a more fluid form, with a greater variety of shapes and more intuitive compositions. In intuitively responding to the works, viewers are guided through the space by their own affect. Sen Chung prescribes no fixed way of seeing or interpretation, aiming instead for meaning to emerge through the viewer’s own response.

​

“The contemplation of pure form leads to a state of extraordinary exaltation and complete detachment from the concerns of life.”. 2

​

For Sen Chung, the realm of color holds no symbolic meaning. The colours instead relate to the artist’s nostalgic experiences of nature and how its atmospheric qualities permeate the painted surface. These subtle tonal shifts, characteristic of traditional East Asian ink painting, have become a recurring element in Chung’s practice. The muted pond-gray depths are created through a thin layer of diluted gesso brushed over dark linen, softly emerging through layers of oil paint can also be understood within this context.

​

For Kandinsky, the “form of beauty” was a spiritual language that externalizes an inner necessity. He understood the essence of art as the process through the spiritual is expressed through form. When shown together, Chung’s paintings establish a presence, a rhythm of interconnectedness that invites a broader reflection on how beauty is given form. Chung’s works present beauty as neither a fixed nor finished form, but as a continually shifting horizon, or a project of becoming. For Sen Chung, the making of the painting is an event in which the inner self is revealed through form. 

​

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

1. “Lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call Significant Form”. Clive Bell, Art, trans. by Young-ju Ahn, Pubple, 2025.

2. Clive Bell, Art, trans. by Young-ju Ahn, Pubple, 2025.