Kwang-Young Chun

Kwang-Young Chunis most well-known for his “Aggregation” series, begun in the 1990s and inspired by his childhood and the mulberry paper (hanji) containers that held cures to his regular maladies. Chun was disheartened by the 1960s and 1970s, faced with relentless war and widening rifts between classes of people he observed while going to school in America. He returned to South Korea and linked hanji’s universal power as a symbol to the simple strength he yearned for: these paper packets held no only the accumulation of knowledge in their contents, but were a product of human experience and affirmed the transfer of knowledge. Chun is inspired by history and the ability one has to overcome nature, society, or the environment for survival. Using mulberry paper pages pulled from old Chinese and Korean texts, individually dyed with natural extracts, the artist creates sculptures and wall pieces that swirl, shrink away from, and expand into space. Chun encourages his viewer to embrace the tension, utilizing this “minimal unit of information” to inspire the recoiling of the materialism.

Chun has exhibited at Woo Yang Museum, Gyeongju, Korea, Towson University Asian Art Center, Maryland, Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, The Museum of Yokohama, Japan?, Baulhchie Institute Museum, Philadelphia, among many others. He was awarded the Presidential Prize in the 41st Korean Culture and Art Prize in 2009, and the Artist of the Year Award in 2001 by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, to name a few. He participated Frontiers Reimagined at the 2015 Venice Biennale.