Heemin Chung.
Photo: Artifacts
Artist to Watch: Heemin Chung’s Densely Layered Paintings Explore Themes of Loss and Eternity
The rising star made her first U.K. solo debut with “Umbra,” currently on view at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London
At the core of Heemin Chung’s conceptual practice is a captivation with perception and how technology can both expand and limit what we see. Yet as more aspects of our lives move online, the Seoul-based artist attempts to draw the digital domain back into the analog world.
Using digitized images as a starting point, Chung creates densely layered paintings with a signature semiopaque gel. The membrane-like sheets form haunting, sculptural shapes and landscapes that evoke a sense of loss. The thin veils of acrylic capture sensory ruptures—or “errors,” as she puts it—that are established by the increased replication of the material world in pixels.
Iris Facing the Northerly Wind 2023, by Heemin Chung. Photo: Janghwal Lim, Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London, Paris, Salzburg, Seoul
“Digitality enables us to explore realms that we cannot physically access and offers an endlessly expanding world,” states the artist. However, it is also superficial, and our bodily senses are rendered obsolete. There is “a paralyzed sense of time,” she says, with no past, no future, essentially an infinite existence.
Chung’s abstracted canvases have yielded a dedicated following in her native South Korea, and over the past few years, her work has been shown widely in the region, including at the 2022 Busan Biennale, the Doosan Art Center, and the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art. In 2023, Thaddaeus Ropac began representing the artist, bringing her oeuvre to the international stage for the first time at the gallery’s Art Basel Hong Kong booth earlier this year.
Marigold in June, 2023, by Heemin Chung. Photo: Janghwal Lim, Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London, Paris, Salzburg, Seoul
Currently on view at its London location through November 20, Chung’s exhibition “Umbra” marks her U.K. solo debut. The works presented tackle the idea of an electronic “eternity” by examining death through a reimagining of the traditional Korean funeral ritual chobun. Intended to free the soul from the body, it’s often accompanied by a performance with songs of the dead called dasiraegi, which is reinterpreted by Chung in a new video work.
Rather than exploring the meaning of the custom or reflecting an interest in spirituality, this series, according to Chung, is about “understanding and empathizing with how our ancestors faced death.” By doing so, perhaps we may better grieve the detachment from our physical bodies that our digital era has wrought.
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2024 Collectors Issue in the “Artists to Watch” section. Subscribe to the magazine.
Cover: Heemin Chung.
Photo: Artifacts
