chung heeseung INADEQUATE METAPHORS
This catalogue is published by HADA Contemporary to accompany the exhibition:
CHUNG HEESEUNG INADEQUATE METAPHORS 6 - 30 MARCH 2014 No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any mean, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without prior written permission from HADA Contemporary Ltd.
chung heeseung INADEQUATE METAPHORS
CHUNG HEESEUNG INADEQUATE METAPHORS
HADA Contemporary is delighted to present first UK solo exhibition by Chung Heeseung (b. 1974) featuring new works from her Still-life (2009 -) series. Chung’s artistic practice unfolds as she visually articulates the indefinable and unstable state in which subjects exists questioning the uncertain identity of the photography. Focusing on the liminal and dormant state in which everything is fluid and transformative, rather than investing in finding answers, the works from her practice are the process and journey towards exploring invisible and fragile meanings beneath the physical surface.
Still-life began as independent photographic images that gradually evolved into a body of work that investigates some of key aspects in her practice - the liminal state of being and the visualisation of inner self in photography. ‘As the liminal state is more related to becoming than being, and to continuation than fixation, ‘Still-’ implies aspiration on ‘duration’ overcoming ‘stillness’ as a generic meaning of photography. It is not spatial and measurable time but contracting and expanding subjective time. It is not only the time of the subject of photography, but also the time of the viewer interacting with a photograph.’[1] The artist patiently observes and photographs mundane objects from her studio that was former residence of her partner in the utmost simplicity left in the gentle flow of the time and light.The unusual juxtaposition of objects in breezy vacant spaces allows the tranquil and lengthy breathe and pause of the vision that is further aided by the symbiotic installation of the works within the exhibition spaces. As if re-hanging or re-placing old furniture in a new house, the installation of the fragments of her studio into the gallery space creates odd sense of disorientation somewhat lost afloat nowhere. Simultaneously, the perplexity of the unique harmony of the visual rhythm through elements such as Dash (2013) creates the gentle waves of push and pull allowing the fresh flow of thoughts and emotions. Many of her previous series took on the form of portraiture to examine the quality of latency as seen in Persona (2007) and Reading (2009 – 2010). As Reading was developed during the same period pivoting on capturing the physical remnants of the subtle emotional and psychological changes generated by the instability of the actors during their reading, Still-life fundamentally shares the similar concern as she photographs the unidentifiable state of the objects amid continuous transformative states. Although differ in the choice of object of depiction, her efforts lie in translating into an image the physical presentation of the invisible inner self. Resultantly, Still-life are open and ambiguous portraits of the subjects inviting the viewers to the most secretive places of themselves. Since the mid-1960s, the playful conceptualism of still-life photography driven by attempts to make art from the matter of daily life, by breaking down the boundaries between the artist’s studio, the gallery and the world has become an important strand of photography. They ultimately destabilise the notion of an object as a discrete plastic form without connections to the environment in which it appears underpinning the transformation of mundane objects into a subject within conceptual substance and visual intrigue. [2] Continuing the trajectory of development of the still-life photography but not confined or limited by the tradition, she explores further as she
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detaches the contexts and the environments in the efforts to grasp the liminal, invisible and unphotographable inner self of a subject. The contemporary visual cultures have been nurturing and reinforcing the habit of deciphering and reading images that are often born and bred with innumerable symbolic and semiotic social contexts. Evidently, ensuing the excruciating difficulty in seeing. Against all odds, Chung condenses the subjects to themselves devoid of legible indexical lexicon. The level of distilledness present in her works have the ability to achieve powerful and poetic aesthetic tonality with such an economy of means reminiscent that of reductionist’s simplicity as Roni Horn. As the ice turns into the water and into the vapour through the smouldering heat, her subjects are distilled to their core essence through multitude of transformations through the serene gaze. Further, she disassociates abundant tacit symbols, references and metaphors attached to the subjects through the unusual compositions vaguely analogous to the surrealists or dadaists endeavours. As Susan Sontag notes ‘that there is a kind of surrealist sensibility in photography which is very important… one of the great traditions in photography is taking the neglected, homely object, the corner of something, the interesting surface, preferably a bit deteriorated or decayed with some kind of strange pattern on it. That is a way of seeing which is very much promoted by photography and has influenced people’s way of seeing – whether they use camera or not.’[3] As the title of the exhibition suggests, at the heart of Chung’s works circulate the possibility of the open-endedness of an image - an image without metaphors thus available to all. Through these visual spaces of the void, the viewers encounter the gateway to form an active relationship with the subjects. Only then, you are seeing. You are seeing them for the first time.
Chung Heeseung (b.1974) received MA and BA in photography at London College of Communication, London. She has exhibited extensively in Korea and UK such as ArtSonje Center Seoul, Songeun Art Space, Doosan Gallery Seoul and New York, National Museum of Singapore, Espacio Menosuno Madrid, South Hill Park Bracknell among others. She was awarded with 11th Daum Art Prize Korea 2012, Songeun Art Award Korea 2011, Critical Mass Top 50 by Photolucida USA 2008 and shortlisted for Photo Espana 2008 Descubrimientos PHE Spain and Nikon Discovery Awards 2007 UK.
[1] [2] [3]
Heeseung Chung, Artist Statement – Still-life, 2012 Charlotte Cotton, the photography as contemporary art, Thames & Hudson, 2009, pp. 115-131 Susan Sontag, ‘Photography Within The Humanities’, The Photography Reader, (Liz Wells. Ed), p. 65
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Cur tain | archival pigment print | 158 x 215 cm | 2013
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Dash | brass tube | 3 x 300 x 3 cm | 2013
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Descendant | archival pigment print | 160 x 120 | 2013
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Dead Bee | archival pigment print | 107 x 80 cm | 2013
Toress Sky | archival pigment print | 107 x 82 cm | 2013
Mirror | off-set print pile , 1000 sheets | 70 x 94 cm | 2013
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Slash | brass tube | 3 x 300 x 3 cm | 2013
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Two Wedges-1 | archival pigment print | 66 x 49.5 cm | 2011
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Untitled | archival pigment print | 67 x 50 cm | 2013
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Untitled | archival pigment print | 69.4 x 52 cm (each) | 2013
Heeseung Chung: A Guest without a Host Lyle Rexer
“We live in an image-saturated world, and it is nearly impossible to perceive reality without being aided by this medium, but the relationship between photographic images and reality is very insecure, like a leaking ceiling. After all, it seems my work is to explore those cracks and holes of the ceiling…” - Heeseung Chung
With the advent of the camera, it’s been said, photography usurped from architecture the responsibility of measuring time. Buildings of that earlier period were meant to register in their facades and windowed interior rooms the transit of the day, and in their noble exterior decay the slow and inevitable movement of human creation toward oblivion. No wonder William Henry Fox Talbot’s early photographs centered around the physical forms of Lacock Abbey, the sort of stately home that was disappearing like the dinosaur from an industrialized England. (It helped Talbot that buildings do not move, making it possible to take a good picture with a very slow emulsion.) It was almost as if those early photographers, who recorded so many buildings, so many architectural wonders, in locations ranging from Shanghai to Cairo, were simply taking an inventory of where time stood (or where civilizations stood in relation to it). Truly this was the epochal shift, the point where human society’s predominate cognitive orientation changed from spatial to visual, the beginning stage in the production of that “image-saturated world.” The Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s memory palace, an archive in which bits of knowledge were mentally affixed to the walls of an imaginary palace layout, was replaced by the album of views, the portable visual archive, the portmanteau of memory, every impression flattened into two dimensions and leeched of its sounds and smells. With photography, the basic unit of time began to shrink toward zero, the instants becoming replaceable units. To recover narrative, form, coherence, required a piecing back together of visual fragments (the birth of the motion picture). In her current exhibition at the Art Sonje Center, Heeseung Chung undertakes a complicated act of recovery, using photographs to get beyond appearances, to reconvene space and formulate a personal, elastic sense of time. In the process, she cannot help questioning the expectations that photographs inspire, the “cracks of the ceiling,” as she puts it. She arranges her photographs not simply as an archive of memories but as an installation that reconfigures and even extends the limits of the gallery. Considered individually, many of the pictures are enigmatic, enticing but disconcerting in their reticence. Taken as a group they constitute a journey through space(s) that very quickly reveals an interior itinerary. The display space has presented the artist a seductive but difficult challenge. Its shape is a quarter circle, the curve defined by a series of structural columns. A wall has been added perpendicular to the long radius wall, bisecting it and defining two distinct areas. Neither of these is fully visible from any single point in the exhibition space, not even from the curved rim. To complicate matters further, the artist has placed one of the key photographs, the image of a bathtub taken with a mirror, on the floor, opening a kind of visual cavity. Hanging from the ceiling is a portrait, the only representation of a person in the exhibition. Untitled | archival pigment print | 84 x 63 cm | 2013
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What the visitor experiences, then, is a process of partial or gradual disclosure. The space does not permit a panoptic view but must be reconstructed mentally as the visitor moves through it. The relationship of architecture to image is one of constant interaction, with the viewer’s own body as a meeting point that moves. What happens at this intersection, at the moment in space and time when an experience discloses itself? The character of the experience, its depth, depends on the content and sequence of the images. As Chung has described them, the photographs were inspired by her husband’s parents’ house, which through a series of events, became for a time her studio. She has described herself as a stranger in this domestic world, “a guest without a host.” The act of photographing aspects of the house represents the classic strategy of using the camera to take the measure of a place, to get a bearing, to map it. But it also demonstrates the very process that the studio is meant to foster: imaginative generation of images. So the photographs are at once direct re-presentations and elusive references. Newel post, bathtub, curtain and ceiling light constitute her inventory of a physical place, but they also symbolize, for the artist, memories and impressions of the house as studio and habitus. What took place at these sites and with these objects? Were events tranquil, inspirational or traumatic? A house suggests all of these. Perhaps, however, there were no events, or at least nothing precise or even visible. Certainly the artist has felt free to invert images, reduce their context, and complicate the point of view. A light fixture appears to hang upside down from a ceiling which appears as a floor. A stairway is doubled and turned upside down. A dead bee is reflected on the corner of a mirror. A pair of chairs, also seen upside down, seems to defy gravity. A plate dug up from the backyard and photographed looks like a biologist’s Petri dish or the tarnished moon of some unknown planet. A photograph of a photograph pinned to the wall reveals a folded and creased swatch of blue sky. Intimacy is promised; distance intervenes. Chung calls these open-ended metaphors, and they are certainly that: comparisons from which the second term has been removed. Better, perhaps, to call them unpinned symbols or free-floating signifiers, their ultimate references known only to the artist, perhaps not even to her, at least not consciously. They are presented to us as provocations, delicate and deliberate attempts to stir up associations and contradict certainties. What, for example, are photographs of cacti in a green house doing in the middle of this “house”? It certainly has something to do with creativity and slow growth, maybe more to do with the sexualized imagination being a kind of hot house full of strange fruit. We are familiar with the psychic impact of photographs from the work of the surrealists, who saw photography as a way to harvest the anonymous uncanny visual gifts of the street. This house, this psychic space, has the disorienting feeling of a dream. But Chung’s gaze is more intensified and precise, her solicitation calmer and yet more delirious. To paraphrase Man Ray, how arid her desert is, and how fertile! It seems unnecessary at this point to indicate that photographs are always and only documents, not to be mistaken for the things they represent and not, in Chung’s case, to be taken at face value. On a purely visual level they require interpreting, and that act itself can be disorienting. When she places on the gallery floor the image of a bathtub, seen in a mirror and shifted toward the horizontal, a double well seems to open at our feet: first the corner of the bathroom, then the tub. The viewer is drawn almost literally out of the gallery space itself, into a sideways depth that leads nowhere. Chung’s photographs show us things and confound that showing in order to awaken thoughts about other things. We referred to surrealism and might also point to other contemporary photographers, especially Korean artists, who share Chung’s disconcerting precision when it comes to the ordinary. Yet the deeper inspiration for this exhibition derives not from images but from poetry, and the situation of a specific poet, Emily Dickinson. In nineteenth century Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson’s life was circumscribed by domesticity, although she never married. Chung has expressed fascination for the
expansiveness of her vision in contrast to the narrow ordinariness of her circumstances – indeed the outright hostility of society to the idea of a woman poet willing to depict extreme states of mind: love ecstasy, religious vision and despair. Confined as she was, Dickinson managed through language to fashion an idiom that could open chasms in the floor, so to speak, and deal with the largest themes in the smallest space: Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality. And:
Best things dwell out of sight The Pearl – the Just – Our Thought.
They dwell out of sight until they are brought to light. Poetry is the transformation of private thought into public utterance, the deliverance of words into a new life on the page and in the minds of others. Photography is the transformation of private vision into public view, and into a new life in the eyes and minds of others. Dickinson never published her poems; she was her own audience, she and the man for whom she wrote so many of the poems, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her unrequited love. He advised her not to publish them, and so she never had to risk the gap between her words and the world – the artist’s risk, the risk that a personal, improvisational exploration can somehow be meaningful to others, and that those meanings can never be under the artist’s control. In Chung’s case, she risks that the space she has examined, interpreted and refashioned can somehow be open to others. Entering it, they enter someone else. Not the artist, who is long gone, disappeared behind the images, but someone else, a someone whose mental world is now theirs. That is the significance I attach to the one portrait in the exhibition. It is not a portrait of the artist but someone else she photographed; it too is slightly misleading, slightly disorienting. Like the entire installation, it conceals and reveals at the same time. Which is precisely how photographs themselves act. Although they appear very specific, they are detached from their originating context, from the narrative of time and intention, to function as natural symbols, or as oracles, portentous and uncanny. Viewers examine them not for their veracity but for clues to their own experience, their own memories, fears and subtle apprehensions. In the face of these specific images, of still curtains, bathroom abysses, unlit lights, and empty shelves – images full of emptiness, we might say – we are being asked to negotiate with the absent ones, the “hosts,” the dead who still inhabit any previously occupied place, even if we cannot see them. Thus the space we enter is, in the end, more about us than about the artist, more about what cannot be seen rather than what is shown, more a portrait of our interior than hers. She plays the host who asks us to enter, then withdraws, leaving us to find our way.
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Untitled | archival pigment print | 105 x 79.1 cm | 2013
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Untitled | archival pigment print | 160 x 120 cm | 2013
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Untitled | archival pigment print | 175 x 120 cm | 2013
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CHUNG HEESEUNG
b.1974 Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea EDUCATION 2007 MA Photography with Distinction, London College of Communication, London, UK 2005 BA Photography, London College of Communication, London, UK (Hons) 1996 BA Painting, Hong-Ik University, Seoul, Korea SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2014 Inadequate Metaphors, HADA Contemporary, London, UK 2013 Inadequate Metaphors, The 11th Daum Prize, Ar t Sonje Center, Seoul, Korea 2012 Still life, Doosan Gallery, New York, USA 2011 Unphotographable, Doosan Gallery, Seoul, Korea 2008 Persona,Galler yWa,Seoul, Korea GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2014 Photography and Media: 4 AM, Seoul Museum of Ar t, Seoul, Korea 2013 Heeseung Chung, Richard Koker, Jochen Klein, Ruoff Stiftung, Nür tingen, Germany Chung Heeseung & Je Baak, HADA Contemporary, London, UK 2011 Songeun Ar t Award Show, Songeun Ar t Space, Seoul, Korea 2010 The Triumph of Failure, South Hill Park, Bracknell, UK I love your profile, Espacio Menosuno, Madrid, Spain Singapore International Photography Festival, National Museum of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore Divided Gaze, Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul, Korea I love your profile, University of Cadiz, Cadiz, Spain Maden Pictures, Arario Gallery, Cheonan, Korea The Triumph of Failure, Noam Gallery, Seoul, Korea 2009 Photography as Contemporary Ar t, Doosan Gallery, Seoul, Korea 2008 Seoul International Photography Festival, Ancient Seoul station, Seoul, Korea 4482_Emerging Korean ar tists in London, Barge House, London, UK Photo España 2008 Descubrimientos PHE, Consejeria de Cultura y Turisimo, Madrid, Spain Sensibility of the Ar tist, Ssamzie Ar t Mar t, Seoul, Korea 2007 Nikon Discovery awards, London Olympia Conference Centre, London, UK MAP 2007 Final Show, London College of Communication, London, UK Photography for Beginners, LCC Eckersley Gallery, London, UK CURATORIAL PROJECT 2010 The Triumph of Failure, Noam Gallery, Seoul AWARDS & RESIDENCIES 2012 The 11th Daum Ar t Prize, Parkheonhi Foundation, Korea Doosan Residency, Doosan Gallery, New York, USA 2011 SougEun Ar t Award, SongEun Ar t Foundation, Korea 2008 Photo España 2008 Descubrimientos PHE, Shor t listed, Spain Critical Mass Top 50, Photolucida, USA 2007 Nikon Discovery awards, Shor t listed, UK ‘Sproxton Memorial Award’ for best in show, London College of Communication, UK