Texts

A Few Scenes, or Encounters with the Discarded

October 2006. Venue: the special exhibition hall of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. Railroad ties that for long years had borne countless trains with their whole bodies are standing upright. As though they had received some revelation while lying in the open fields, they have rushed into the inner sanctum of the museum and now stand tall. Their clamor filled the mountain valleys of Gwacheon. The one who gave life once again to these ties, which had completed their appointed role and come to the end of their days, is CHUNG Hyun, the very artist the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea named its ‘Artist of the Year’. The artist trimmed the ties to a height of about three meters and set them up in ranks. These forty structures overwhelmed the vast space and broke with the conventions of the museum, for they marked a radical departure in an art world where sculpture was, as a matter of course, assumed to be made only of noble materials such as bronze or granite. The railroad tie, in a word, was something that devoted itself, as the bed of the track, to the speeding train; something that effaced its own existence for the sake of others and so gave rise to a moving tale of sacrifice; nothing more than a lump of wood treated with indifference by human society, whether in service or discarded.

Now the times have changed, and railroad ties are sinking to the status of things thrown away like waste. There is one who turned a warm gaze on this waste: CHUNG Hyun, selected as Artist of the Year. It was the museum’s retrospective that bore this out. The railroad-tie works are titled Untitled, yet the ties call to mind the human lower body. Two pillars clasping a small insert between them are unmistakably a human lower body. These lower bodies omit the torso, the essential part, and above all dispense with the head. For all the years of endurance and the countless scars it carried, the material was nothing more than discarded wood, far removed from elegance. Rough, unsightly blocks of wood, dark in color and covered in scars, they bear witness to years of hardship.

Those railroad ties, timbers that had spent their whole lives lying down, now stand in a throng, ranked in a single direction. Having lost their upper bodies, or rather having cast them off, they produce a certain symbolism. These structures reflect a human society that is becoming ever more material, ever more carnal by the day. They evoke an age in which the spiritual world has been banished and only the fleshly world holds sway. And they are so massive that at times they are almost intimidating. What does this array of burly lower bodies without upper bodies signify?

June 2004. Venue: Kim Chong Yung Museum. Asphalt concrete that once covered paved roads and was discarded when its use came to an end occupies the gallery floor of the museum. The one who hauled this road-paving waste into the museum is none other than CHUNG Hyun. Having drawn attention when the Kim Chong Yung Museum selected him as its ‘Artist Today’, he was holding a solo exhibition to mark the occasion. Here too the artist turned his back on refined sculptural materials and brought in waste instead. Asphalt concrete is the name for the black residue left over after petroleum is refined. Widely used for paving roads, it has helped turn cities into spaces of unrelieved black. Yet when paved roads are dug up for construction or other reasons, the asphalt concrete becomes waste, shunned as a nuisance no one knows how to dispose of. The artist gathered up this cast-off waste and gave it life once again. He cut and trimmed the black lumps to suitable sizes and laid them out across the floor. They may look like the islands of the southern archipelago, but they are, of course, human bodies lying down.

Waste settled on sand: a site of rebirth. More than that, it summons up a tenacious vitality. The stone garden of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto, vaunted as the epitome of artificial beauty, is a contrived garden in which fifteen stones, large and small, are judiciously placed on lines raked into a bed of sand. It is loudly praised as a symbol of Japanese beauty, or as the formal manifestation of the Zen mind. It used to be said that the stones are arranged in the shape of the character for ‘heart’ (心); now, according to a recent study, the arrangement matches the constellation Cassiopeia, and there are attempts to elevate it outright to a ‘garden of the cosmos’. Later generations have loaded this arrangement of sand and stones with enormous meaning. To think that Japanese beauty can be distilled and expressed in such a way!

Should I call such beauty good, or should I say I dislike it? I am at a loss for words. Lumps of stone set on sand: the one strikes too lofty a pose, inviting ever more pedantic approaches, and so leads us to give up the smell of human sweat. The form made of discarded asphalt concrete laid on sand, by contrast, makes us ruminate on human existence, or on the nature of matter. The virtue inherent in that essence is none other than the scent of humanity. Above all, to give life once again to things discarded as useless, things so unsightly that no one cares for them, things so ugly and worthless! CHUNG Hyun’s work connects directly to the return of the human form, that is, the return of vitality.

Giving Life to What Seems Trivial

In his university years CHUNG Hyun was thoroughly baptized in a modernism detached from social reality. His doubts as a student led to a period of wandering. Nor, for all that, did he hold his ground at the scene of the student movement. Instead he chose to study in France, the so-called mecca of ‘high art’, resolved to build an artistic world of his own. His homecoming exhibition, however, drew attention by being filled with unexpected works. He had taken the human being as his theme, yet so-called bodily beauty was disregarded. These were neither ideally proportioned beauties nor elegant bodies carved in fine stone like those of many Italian-trained artists. Apart from his disregard for form, what he chose were shabby human beings (?) of manila hemp and plaster, with no so-called ‘market value’. This beginning, so different from that of the French-trained artists before him, led people to expect something radical from CHUNG Hyun’s career.

His subject is the human being, a constant object of inquiry from his youth into his mature years. The materials he chooses, moreover, are not fine ones but cheap, outmoded, unsightly things, little better than waste. Hence his works are made of such trivial things as railroad ties, asphalt concrete, coal and rough stones. Even when it comes to stone, CHUNG Hyun prefers rough stones that can be picked up anywhere to fine stones such as granite or marble. These are so-called useless lumps of rock, unfit even for building material. Rough stones have no shape, and even their grain is irregular, so they are not easy to work. Yet through the irregular nature of the stone the artist discovers chance, and in the course of working he builds formal structure.

Rather than insisting on his own will from the outset, he comes to understand the nature of the material as he handles it, and seeks a point of mutual accord. The same holds for his work with lumps of coal bought directly from a coal mine. Spend time with a haphazardly shaped lump of coal, and sooner or later a form of its own is bound to emerge. Communing with these unsightly, trivial materials, to which other sculptors would never pay the slightest attention, the artist seeks a path to the birth of new life. The artist says:

“There was a time when bronze or marble alone was considered the material for a finished sculpture. Many sculptors use plaster, but they tend to think of it only as a material for studies. I liked the freshness that plaster gives. Having no money was also an important reason. Railroad ties, asphalt concrete, rough stones: all are trivial, insignificant things, and easy to come by. All of them have endured ordeals, and they are nothing more than things to be thrown away. I liked this unprocessed, raw, vivid quality.” (From the catalogue published by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea)

CHUNG Hyun turned an affectionate eye on insignificant things, and especially on the raw, unprocessed quality of things that have endured ordeals. Ordeal and rawness: these are important concepts. As he confesses: “The moment I saw the discarded railroad ties, I vividly felt the years of endurance in which they had silently borne the massive weight, and the wind and rain, beneath the rails. It was as if each tie came to me as a human being, and as a history. It was junk no one would look at, yet it seemed to have an immense energy melted into it.” The railroad tie, once waste, is now sublimated into a human being, and even raised to the stature of a history, resurrected as a kind of wellspring of energy.

Not that the work with railroad ties went smoothly from the start. He says again: “I began working with railroad ties in earnest in 1998, but once I actually got down to it, I could not see the nature of the ties—I could see only myself. I was grappling with the material, trying to overpower it. I felt that this was not right; only my own drive had been strong. I came to think that if both the ties and I were to live, I would have to understand their good qualities and play with them. I would like the work to be seen not as an extreme reduction to either side—form or materiality, spirit or body—but as a harmony.”

CHUNG Hyun clearly understood the course he had to take. It lay in an attitude of playing with and befriending the material, and in pursuing a world of symbols that are contained naturally, rather than the imposition of contrived forms, that is, of meanings that are made.

The Wounded Body, or the Image of Human Nature

An artist who handles humble materials cannot have an elegant working process either, for rough materials demand excessive labor and at times a bold approach. Work on the human figure, whether from an aestheticist or a realist perspective, has respected form in its own way. Yet work in a hidebound academic manner can, divorced from essence, also convey a certain feebleness, because it is not easy for it to meet the qualities latent deep within. His struggle therefore began, before anything else, with breaking form. Removing and omitting form, without subscribing to the tenets of abstract art, was the result of an effort to convey some new message. Gradually the artist came to make forms of his own by handling his materials roughly, or even violently. At first glance these works look like unprocessed ore. Like a single lump of stone or of coal, they do not scatter traces of deliberate working. Respecting the nature of the material, he leaves only the minimum of working. In other words, as in the artist’s own words, he longs for the raw state and pursues a new energy. The freshness of the raw: that is the starting point of infinite possibility.

There one receives a fresh message of wildness. This is also a distinguishing mark that sets his work apart from ordinary sculpture, which seeks only to be decoratively pretty. In fact, the human body has been treated in the art world as outdated and old-fashioned. This stems from problems in the mode of expression and in the point of view. Yet the human being cannot but remain an eternal subject for as long as humans exist on this earth. For human beings, what artistic subject could be more precious than the human being? What matters, surely, is the method of interpretation and the artistic response. From first to last, CHUNG Hyun takes the human body as the source of his artistic world and seeks to probe the question of human essence. Breaking away from a stuffy art world that looks at the body only at the level of representation, he tries to speak of the spirit through the body.

As a natural consequence, figuration weakens, and only the substance of essence remains, as a single mass. That one does not immediately sense the presence of a body in his figure works is probably a result of the same context. CHUNG Hyun has also made a considerable number of drawings in coal tar. He has also given shape to the human figure on waste paper such as newspaper and corrugated cardboard. Coal tar, its density varied with the thinner, supports the effects of the drawing. The bodies in the drawings are robust and pulse with life. Material and subject combine superbly to produce the effect of the picture plane. In his drawings of heads, new shoots are sprouting from the top of the head—a kind of qi, or vital energy. In some they are green grass. They signify vitality.

Rough Work, Delicate Temperament

CHUNG Hyun is an artist who combines the dual qualities of delicacy and roughness. Working with rough materials such as railroad ties, asphalt concrete, coal and rough stones by no means makes him a rough character. Quite the opposite: he is an artist of a surprisingly delicate and warm-hearted temperament. One of his particular talents is that he is an expert at cooking fish. The delicacy of fish cuisine, like the taste of French wine, demands a finely developed palate. Yet this master of fish cookery does not favor only premium fish. Rather, he loves the humble mixed catch of lesser fish. Just as the Noryangjin Fish Market at dawn has become one of his favorite places to stroll, CHUNG Hyun trains and practices his sense of taste for the sake of his sense of beauty (in Korean the two words are homophones, both pronounced mi-gam).

Just as he relishes raw slices of lesser fish, he lends meaning to trivial things found at the bottom of everyday life. At a Japanese restaurant he prefers the lesser fish that could never be served as a main dish—the so-called tsukidashi, the small dishes set out before the meal. CHUNG Hyun’s art connects not to the elegant, lavish plate of haute cuisine but to an ‘aesthetics of tsukidashi’, of what is set out as mere extras. That is why he gives form to the human being—yes, to that grand theme, the human being—with discarded railroad ties and asphalt concrete. And he does so by erasing form and confronting essence, thereby evoking a new vitality. The birth of new life must surely call for a delicate hand.

November 2007. Venue: Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan. The museum, which recently opened in a newly constructed building, acquired a monumental work, Wooden Utility Poles, for the entrance to its building. It is a prodigious large-scale work in which six utility poles are erected to a height of more than seventeen meters. The artist is CHUNG Hyun. The work had originally stood guard at the entrance of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, during his exhibition there. It was later invited to a special exhibition at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art and, judged to be in harmony with the museum’s bare surroundings, remained there on long-term installation until the museum recently decided to purchase it. Rising straight toward the sky, these utility poles resemble the flagpole supports that stand before a Buddhist temple, or the sotdae poles that once guarded sacred ground. What is certain is that, as the museum’s landmark, they make a strong impression on visitors. These poles, too, are things that had their day and have now outlived their use. Yet gathered together, even such enormous wooden pillars hold up the sky, and so give rise to a symbolism of their own. This calls up an atmosphere quite different from that of Richard Serra’s enormous steel-plate installation at the entrance of the museum of contemporary art in Dallas. The steel plates are like a hymn to industrial society, born of planned intention. The utility poles, by contrast, are sturdy, like the common people of this land who have held out unbowed through the long ages. They may also be felt as the image of those common people who, never yielding, rise again and again toward the sky. A tree is beautiful when it stands tall toward the sky. The railroad ties that once lay flat, too, offer beauty when they stand upright. All of these call to mind another aspect of the human being, and at times serve as a measure in the inquiry into human nature. To interpret the human body anew through waste and trivial things, and with it to grant new life: in this sense, too, CHUNG Hyun’s work commands attention.

Incheon locals can frequently spot giant containers or trucks loaded with industrial materials while driving or taking a walk since Incheon is a trade port with an airport and railroads. When a truck passes, the ground quietly sinks, albeit to a microscopic degree, and non-subjects including the sounds coming from the truck-machines, dust, the smell of diesel, and the forms, smells and creaking noises of the loaded materials (raw lumber, scrap metal, and export-bound cars) are quickly perceived in one lump.

One usually looks past them as brief surprises or fear of having had their safety threatened, but if they ponder it again they will be stunned by how even sentiments connected to the sensations of different parts of the body are vividly revealed. The artist Chung Hyun's discarded crosstie work includes whole sensibilities and sentiments from such memories of what he ordinarily felt by the railroad as a child. The artist, who discovered the depth of experience and sentiments in the traces of the scrapped crossties that have gone through a process of severe hardships, creates art revealing and elevating the value of lowly and invisible, trivial things.

Viewers imagine and think about life's process within past time held by entities with exhausted economic use value, as well as the strange, dark and lonely emotions given by dry and rough visual forms they face first. The space and time of the moment one meets the non-subjects that have the depth of experience require the dimension in which time and space complexly cross the time of several subjects and non-subjects, and not the everyday dimension of meeting art for cultural enjoyment and as a hobby.

The artist discovered the essence in removed crossties he saw in his youth, and he discovered depth in auditory organs that were dark and dim due to old age. He began to form an awareness of the individual and society through Eunyul mask dances he saw in college, and he realized the valuable meaning in-season freshness provides through fish including large-eyed herrings and gobies. While these four things are related to the place of the area the artist grew up in, the artist does not represent local subject matter and historicism through the idea of the hometown or criticize the local area's absence and deficiencies through the idea of a world of demons.

Instead, he focused more on contemplating the quintessences of humanity as a subject in the world and life and on organizing his life as an artist. When thinking of the Otherness of junked crossties, auditory organs, the Eunyul mask dance, and fish; one can peer into a relationship capable of leaving behind human vs. non-human, place vs. non-place, subject vs. non-subject, nature vs. culture, and object vs. organism human-centered dualist worldviews.

The artist having focused on humanity's essence and depth is for a praxis for a world based on understandings and interpretations between entities that existed in unstratified and relational attitudes but were invisible, rather than being the essence of human beings as subjects in a world centered on people and capital. It is work including the time and space for a place accompanying the moments and processes in which non-subjects hidden by people and capital, such as objects, space, culture, and organisms, reveal their valuable essences.

Art's role and significance as a medium of bright and good appreciation and experiences are being increasingly emphasized in arts and culture education and life culture. In such a situation, the role of art pursuing an essence is heavy, dark, difficult and foreign. Nonetheless, the meaning of art with slow time and spaces of different directions is not light. The artist's installation work represents dramatically emotional sculpture of old and deep non-subjects.

One can intuitively feel the inherent sensibilities revealed by the objects without explanations of their localness or historicity, and they can know it through the objects' practical expressions. Also, it is actual as an expression of time holding time. It is an ontological revolution in transition from a space-centered perspective emphasizing localness and the place to the other axis of temporality. People form deep relationships to the place-qualities of the spaces they grow up and live in as they form their individual worldviews and sensibilities.

However, it is not easy to sensitively and delicately reorganize an area's place-qualities as an artist. When we use the words local art or local artist, we limit their meaning to areas as physical spaces and place-qualities and historicity as the subject matter or subjects of art and activities. I discover a locality as a different localness pursuing the valuable essence through a complex and delicate temporality non-subjects hold and recomposing it with reflection on the human and capital centered world, from an unstratified and relational, diverse cultural anthropological perspective; rather than forming close relationships with any human-centered localness, place-qualities or historicity; in the artist Chung Hyun's work. eunyoung chae studied statistics, arts management, and art theory.

She is a research-based curator with a strong interest in the imagination and praxis of visual art that has a healthy tension relationship with capital and the institution in the urban space. She has been running space imsi, which is involved with visual art, the idea of localities, and ecological politics, since 2016. "

The exhibition, "Artist of the Year" at National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea has been annually organized by selecting an artist who has shown the most outstanding activity in the Korean art world.

This year, the sculptor, Chung Hyun has been selected for the exhibition.

In the world of contemporary art where new genres and new media constantly come into fashion, Chung Hyun is searching for significance and esthetic sense of his works through the traditional subject of human body.

Although rough and crude as if unfinished, his works contain serious reflections on life and human.

The artist's interpretation of sculpture is "power" and "energy". In other words, they contain the image of human as an individual being, that is, as a being that recognizes its own essence. While expressing power through human forms, the artist discovers the forces of' freshness detected in the trivial, liveliness of the raw, unpredictable images, abruptness and primitive violence, etc. 'from material properties of fragments and fortuity in the courses of creation. He brings life to the materials far distant from being the traditional materials of sculpture, such as railroad ties for railways, asphalt concrete, rough stones and coal, etc., which can be regarded as the remnants of civilization.

The exhibition offers us a glimpse of Chung's art world from past to present. It features 60 sculptures and 60 drawings from five different time periods, showing us the changes in form and material. I believe this exhibition will provide the public the precious opportunities of experiencing the inner world of this sincerely trying sculptor who have been continuously substantiating his existence through artworks.

With sincere gratitude to the artist who have unsparingly dedicated effort for this exhibition, I would like to thank collectors who have offered the precious art pieces for the exhibition and also to thank staffs for their hardworking.

Sculptor Chung Hyun has been selected as 'artist of the year 2006.' Established in 1995, the 'Artist of the Year' award is given annually to the artist who has shown the most outstanding activity in representing the Korean art world. Selected by curators of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, the artist is given the opportunity to hold a solo exhibition at the Museum the following year and Chung Hyun is the first to be given the award in the field of sculpture.

In his work, Chung Hyun has mainly focused on the human body. Although most contemporary artists have experimented by making various attempts to express facial features, Chung has constantly explored the significance of art form through the human body. His works seem unfinished, therefore appearing rough and crude. However, internally, his works contain genuine anguish for life and human beings and displays humans as individual entities standing on their own.

The artist's interpretation of sculpture is "power" and "energy." The artist, while expressing power through the dynamism of the human body, discovers power from fortuity of the courses of creation and physical substantiality of the pieces, such as freshness discovered in the trivial, power of life exuded from the raw, unpredictable images, abruptness and primitive violence, etc.. For him, the trivial are remnants of civilization, such as railroad tie, asphalt concrete and stones, which are distant from the traditional materials of sculpture. The artist mentions the importance of material in his work by saying that he 'plays with the materials, rather than fighting against them 'in order to bring out the properties of the materials as much as possible.

The exhibition offers us a glimpse of Chung's art world from past to present. It features 60 sculptures and 60 drawings from four different time periods, showing us the changes in form and material.

His first piece was created between 1985 and the early 1990s, which was the period of his studies in France. He is expressing the dynamic human body with several compressed lines that do not display volume, such as bone structures and muscles, etc. by distorting the actual figures. The tension in this piece is accentuated by manila hemp in plaster and tautly stretching it over the surface.

The second was created in the years of 1995~1999. This bronze head and torso without eyes, nose and mouth is contorted and shows many vague traces to express the pain of human existence.

The third was created in the last 1990s to the early 2000s. In this piece, where he worked with railroad tie, the human body is almost completely dismantled to border on abstract. The wood torn into pieces and railroad tie cut with ax and attached in entanglement represent human as a being that has been predestined to endure stoic life. This phase of his work is significant not only in terms of the size of his works, but also the introduction of new materials.

The fourth work was created in 2004~2005 by using asphalt concrete, unprocessed stones and coal lumps.

The works made of asphalt concrete are human figures created by combining masses violently cut up into pieces with an electric saw. They strongly illustrate only the physical substantiality of the material used. Also from unprocessed stones and coal lumps, the artist produced abstract figures.

Through his art world, Chung Hyun, who adds contemporary interpretation into traditional sculpture and brings abandoned materials into the world of art, let us look back at the aesthetics of 'novelty' which is spreading out as a craze in present times.

Q. I think your works have focused on a body by now. Do you regard yourself as a 'body sculptor?'

A. I have never given a priority to a body itself in my work. A body is just an object to me. I would say that a body has been a good object to express a life, and that's the reason I choose it.

Q. Your works seem to be away from a direct expression or an aesthetic production of a body. However, frankly speaking, I would like to point out your attitude to stick to a traditional theme, a body, compared to other sculptors of the same age who have attempted bold experiments.

A. A sculpture of a human body is very familiar to people. So, they may not be able to find freshness from it. However, I do not concentrate on freshness at the beginning. I just enjoy finding out a variety of life of human beings little by little as opening my eyes to the world gradually.

Q. I am a little bit doubt about that you do not care about freshness as a contemporary artist.

A. Devoting for freshness is a kind of the features of contemporary arts. However, freshness exists not only in a new thing but an old one. In my case, freshness would be found in my trial to change relationships between me and objects.

Q. I think your works in the day you studied abroad focused on lines. But, your first private exhibition seems to be disconnected from the feature.

A. Themes of both works are based on power. The subject is still alive in my works. It is sometimes presented as lines and sometimes as a vague, lump form without specific expression. The works created when I studied abroad are born through a process to break the Realism. I wanted to get into the point without superfluity. That is represented with lines. Each line means a realistic existence of spirits torn apart. Even at that time, there were some works with volume. I made a specific form into a lump by hitting or driving with a lump of steel or a wooden bat. In the end, emotions were concentrated and then the volume became distinctive. I think such massive works appeared in my first private exhibition in 1992.

Q. You have mentioned the words like 'power' or 'energy' as essence of your sculpture by now. Can I interpret the improvisatory attitude in your recent works as a way to capture a power of life more vividly?

A. While engaged in drawing, I realized that the power of life was embedded in the action of gathering certain thoughts into emotion, spreading it throughout the body and having it reach certain materials by using the appropriate tools. In fact, a succinct phrase can often be more intense than a long piece of prose. Although some may say that my actions of drawing or hitting stones with an iron maul are extemporary, I perform these actions for a number of intentions. In other words, I would like to describe my actions in work as writing a poem by gathering various thoughts and releasing them with emotion.

Q. So far, your selection of materials has been very interesting. From the latter half of the 1980s, you started using plaster and rotten wood. Recently, you are using railroad ties, coal and various stones. What would be the consistency, if any, that connects all of these together?

A. There were times in which I thought only bronze or marble was the material to be used for a complete piece of sculpture. Many sculptors use plaster, but they tend to regard it only as a material for the study of a final piece. I liked the fresh feeling of plaster. The fact that I did not have money was also an important link. Railroad ties, asphalt concrete, stones etc... These were trivial, insignificant and easy to find. They all suffered through the times of ordeal, and were merely thrown-away wastes. I liked their rawness, liveliness.

Q. You once said that what raised you was earth and what let you express yourself was railroad ties. How did you come to use railroad ties or what do you feel about this material?

A. In fact, I had been keeping my eyes on the enormous energy of sleepers long before I started using them in my work. One day, I found a railroad ties thrown away and I vividly felt its pain of having endured, the heavy weight of rails and rainstorm over the years. It came to me as if a human and history. Although a waste that no one would look at, it appeared to hold enormous energy inside. I liked it, but could not easily work with it. Maybe, it was like seeing something that was stronger that I was. I had to just look at railroad ties for over 10 years as if with unreciprocated love. It was probably in 1998 when I could finally start working with it because I felt I had accumulated enough energy for it.

Q. Tell me about your drawing work?

A. In order to bring back the initial emotions, I make drawings as if leaving a note or keeping a journal. It takes several weeks to complete a single piece of sculpture and drawing was an appropriate way to keep the numerous thoughts and emotions popping out in the course of it. Working with a model in front of me takes away liveliness of my piece. So, I try to place as many drawings as possible in front of me and to watch them while working so that I can continuously feel my emotions. This way, I don't have to create emotions. They just pop out.

Q. The overall aspects in the sculpture world of Korea at the moment do not seem all that bright. The medium of sculpture itself is dying.

A. I thoroughly recognize the ebbing of sculpture. But, what is ebbing particularly is the 'reproductive, realistic and monumental sculpture'. On the other hand, the scope of sculpture is expanding amid the experiments of medium expansion and genre escaping of the recent times. I would like to describe my sculpture as the sculpture that regresses into primitive point of generation. In other words, it is 'sculpture at the point where the fore and the rear meet'. I would like to emphasize that I am not the master of the medium of sculpture, that I have already surpassed the limitations of traditional sculpture and that I am trying to revive the areas ruled out by sculpture.

Q. What do you like to do in the future?

A. I will try to get away from the uselessly serious works. I want to find the ways of converting heaviness and representing it lightly.

The materials Chung Hyun has been showing attention to in the few recent years are mostly 'nothing much'. They are railroad ties expired of use and coal waiting to be given a purpose. Why the interest in nothing much? They have already been or are being used, therefore are not sophisticated. They are simple and crude. In fact, what is truthful is simple and crude. Something that has just been made cannot penetrate into the center. So, the materials he uses are those thrown out from the center or yet to reach the center. Here, the 'center' is practical value. Chung Hyun intends to create aesthetic value from the materials rejected of their practicality. It is because these materials are built in with possibilities given as existing beings prior to and after their practical values. By granting the right to claim one's existence as' already something' and 'yet to be anything', the artist intends to secure aesthetic life that is differentiated from practicality.

Materials are no longer mere objects to him. To materials, he grants the position of subjective being. At the same time, he clearly executes them with substantial causes by escaping from formative causes. The materials, at last, meet up with Chung Hyun, the person who will realize their beings as they truly are. Through his hands,

they slowly reveal their bodies and faces. What is standing with open arms or standing on hands is not a human but a railroad tie. What is lying down is not a human but asphalt. The dark object engulfed in silence is not the face of a human but the face of coal. Although the artist himself is the titular owner of the works, the actual master of them is the materials used. To the materials, which do not have the power to awaken themselves, the artist lends his hands and strength so that they can be reborn. A path not to be found within materials is never to be found outside, either. Only the artist's narration breathes life into the materials and creates a piece of work with meaningfulness. For the artist, materials are the means. For materials themselves, they are the objective. The objective is realized by borrowing the aesthetic sensitivity of the artist. So, emphasis is placed not only on the external aspect displayed in the series of works using railroad ties, asphalt concrete, coal and iron plates, but also on the internal aspect to bring out the story embedded in each material. I define such characteristics of Chung's works as 'naturalistic narrativeness'.

I hope the entire world can sympathize with the uniquely Korean naturalistic narrativeness embedded in the spirit and works of Chung Hyun. However, my concern is on the 'contents' of the naturalistic narrativeness. In order for Chung to confidently introduce himself as a 'sculptor of Korea', I would like to see the elements of 'Korean cheerfulness and gaiety' added in the contents of his works. The narratives of his works are, on the whole, gloomy and dismal. Korea is not just a sad and serious country. The humor and satires contained in folk tales and legendary narratives deliver stories of a bright and pleasant world. Just because the materials are heavy does not mean that the contents need to become heavy and serious as well. I look forward to finding a message of hope emerging from a corner of his works.

The sculpture of Chung Hyun starts from interest in the configuration of a human. From ancient times, the human body has been an important subject matter. In particular, in classical art, the configuration of a human was often treated as a subject implying ideal beauty and was recognizable 'tabloid edition of the universe.' However, the human body expressed by Chung Hyun is starkly different from such traditional sculptures.

The form of his work is rugged, the methods employed intense and sometimes even violent. This 'untamed intensity' is an important factor which adds to the reality not only of the materials but also the existence of humankind. Firstly, the reality of materials is the characteristics discovered in his works where physical attributes of materials, such as plaster, railroad ties and asphalt concrete, are wholly exposed. Plaster works are created by hitting and digging a mass of earth with high plasticity by using the tools such as bars and shovels.

These works hold solid shapes because of such violent processes. Although the form certainly is of a human body or face, it is difficult to find specific shapes from it. By going against the traditional method of delicately depicting and reproducing external forms of the body by using the traditional shoehorn, the artist is escaping from the solidified tradition of reproduction, in other words, the academism. The sculptures of human figures created by using railroad ties, which had been thrown away after long years of supporting heavy trains, or asphalt concrete, the symbol of modern city, are also violent, rough and expressionistic.

The works to display surface textures created by sawing and cutting railroad ties or asphalt concrete with powerful tools of electric saws or grinders are presented with the physical reality of materials extremely accentuated. Through these works, we can experience not only the minimum of human forms, but also the reality of materials themselves. What we must take note of here is the fact that the artist's thought for sculpture, his action to put it into practice and the form as the result of such action are untied together to form a harmonious whole.

The fierceness in his working processes similar to almost violent maltreatment of the materials, however, represents the suggestive characteristic to unite with the materials in certain aspects, rather than aggressive attack towards achieving 'victory' to remove the physical characteristics of the materials. Chung expresses this course of labor as 'playing with materials'. Maybe, it is a type or extension of possession by spirit where the artist's emotions, thoughts and ideologies unite with the vivid properties of materials.

Therefore, the forms created by the artist may well be the totem of an age where god existed. However maltreating he may be to the materials, the artist does not throw away the materials which had been thrown away before. Railroad ties and asphalt concrete stand in their positions as the main elements of his works without their own properties and characteristics destroyed. 'Playing with materials' does not mean he rules over the materials.

It represents the artist's intention to become untied with them. The human forms created by the artist do not let or instruct us to remember specific targets. However, as the emotional sensation stirred up by railroad ties or asphalt concrete is of the accumulated time, the time of endurance over difficulties and the time of silence spent with perseverance to fulfill the individual purposes, etc., we must remember that his human forms represent the reality of being because they let us think about the universal values of human who, although worn out through 'maturation of time', still maintains dignity.

The exhibition series, ‘Today’s Artist’, has been established by the Kim Chong Yung Sculpture Museum to discover and encourage young, talented artists keeping in accordance with the spirit of Kim Chong Yung who was constant in his work as an artist and educator.

Every year, our museum selects at least 2 artists who display singularity of vision and commitment to their art as ‘Today’s Artists’, and invites them for a solo show at the museum. In doing so, along with the ‘The Woo Sung Kim Chong Yung Sculpture Prize’ that the Kim Chong Yung Memorial Enterprise has been carrying out since 1990, we hope to provide the pivotal point in the advancement of Korean sculpture.

‘Today’s Artist’ is an artist who shows great promise in the medium of sculpture with a distinguished body of work, and is carefully selected based on standards that are independent and unique to the Kim Chong Yung Sculpture Museum. Its purpose is to inspire young artists and provide a forum for presentation of their work, carrying out the wishes of Kim Chong Yung who was exceptionally devoted to the training of students.

The sculptor Chung Hyun who is our first ‘Today’s Artist’ this year has already received critical attention for his depiction of the tough and strong human figure using railroad ties. The railroad tie may not seem like an appropriate material for sculpture, however Chung Hyun makes cuts, and clear and sharp incisions on the surface with a power saw to render the basic shape of the human body, thereby changing the tradition of figurative sculpture. Chung Hyun’s railroad tie sculpture commands attention not only for its use of unusual material but also for the symbolism carried by the material. For example, one cannot help but think about ‘the silent endurance’ in human history when considering a material that has weathered the massive weight of the trains while absorbing the natural elements of rain, wind, dust, and oil stains.

In this exhibition Chung Hyun deals with asphalt, yet another unfamiliar material for sculpture. Known as petroleum-asphalt, this artificial byproduct of civilization is the black debris left after the petroleum has been filtered out at the oil field. Its adhesive strength is very high, but it is also very sensitive to temperature, and although it is being widely used for building and paving roads, it is hardly used as material for sculpture.

Chung Hyun gathers clumps of asphalt dug up at road construction sites and cuts them up using a tool like a grinder or makes sharp incisions on the surface to create human figures that are lying down. The human figure composed of several clumps of asphalt resembles a ‘large stone face’ and stimulates our imagination as we look for the human figure in a natural setting. His work takes on a new appearance as one changes viewpoints. When viewed from above one finds a human figure lying down, but when viewed from below the work looks as if stone islands are grouped together in a wide open sea. His work has the forms of both nature and human figure and aims to achieve ‘a living form’ created by raw material and solid mass, as evidenced by his work made of railroad ties.

Not only in sculpture but in drawings, Chung Hyun depicts the overflowing energy of the human spirit through lively and energetic lines and contrasting color tones. Chung Hyun’s work is rough and simple on the surface, but it is also important to remember that one can also find the natural order of death and rebirth. Such quality is in perfect accordance with the aphorism by Kim Chong Yung, who emphasized that “art creates infinite order within finite space.” This is the reason behind our museum’s selection of Chung Hyun as an artist whose work succeed in realizing the ideals pursued by Kim Chong Yung. It is our sincerest hope that the ‘Today’s Artist’ exhibition presented by the Kim Chong Yung Sculpture Museum may reach its ambitious goals of playing a small role in the development of Korean sculpture. We look forward to and appreciate your encouragement and guidance.

The human figure in Chung Hyun’s sculpture

The sculpture by Chung Hyun has been generally categorized as ‘sculpture of the human figure’. This is not entirely wrong. Based on the body of work ranging from his first solo exhibition in 1992, objects constructed with railroad ties around 2000, the work using asphalt-concrete prepared for this exhibition at the Kim Chong Yung Sculpture Museum, and drawings, it is clear that the form of the human body is a recognizable characteristic of his art. The artist himself does not deny that his work began from the study of the human figure and continues to deal with the problem of the sculptural depiction of the human figure. For example, he has said, “By means of sculpture I attempt to reexamine and reinterpret humans and the human figure (…) There still remains a lot to do with the human figure. It is not a thing of the past.” His work has also been widely viewed as “man’s existential state in the face of crisis and despair” or “a portrait of ourselves today with a layer of appearance stripped away”. Sometimes a term like stoicism is suggested to describe his work. The work constructed with the railroad ties in particular is discussed in relation to a kind of “long period of stoicism”. Chung Hyun himself has said, “The railroad tie is a work of art on its own in that it has endured for many years snowstorms and rainstorms, while the train weighs down from above and below the pebbles dig into the wood.”

While it is true that Chung Hyun’s sculpture is related to the human figure and human existence, it nonetheless requires supplementary explanations about the work. The first thing we need to pay attention to in Chung Hyun’s work is that the human figure and human existence, in other words, the anthropomorphic and the figurative aspect of the work is not the ultimate goal of the work. In his work, the form of the human figure only has vague, subtle presence, and as evidenced by the plaster-cast work formed by clay being modeled with a shovel, the railroad tie objects carved with an axe and a power saw, and the asphalt-concrete sculpture in this exhibition, the human figure is almost buried in the intensive sculptural act with the material in many cases. Thus the form of the human figure and the anthropomorphic element only make up a partial aspect of Chung Hyun’s sculpture and a critical description of this partial aspect seems to be the starting point of study of special qualities of Chung Hyun’s work. By asking questions like ‘To what degree is Chung Hyun’s sculpture about the human figure?’, ‘How does the human figure manifest itself?’, and most of all, ‘What else is the work about, if not the human figure?’, we can discern and analyze his work within the dynamic shifts of the structuralized boundaries between the ‘human figure/non-human figure’, or ‘presence of sculpture/absence of sculpture’.

During his study abroad in France, Chung Hyun abandoned the kind of realistic sculpture he had done in Korea and began rough modeling with the clay using tools like a square bar, a lump of metal, and a shovel. The artist considers this period “a turning point leaving behind academic sculpture.” He begins to think of the human figure as “simply the object” and at the same time, his sculpture turns away from the teleological concerns of representation of the human figure and begins to take on ‘various forms of play taking place within the limited condition set forth by the human body’. When he says that “the human figure is simply the object”, it means that the form of the human figure is not the final aim but it doesn’t necessarily mean that his work is completely turning away from it. In Chung Hyun’s previous work as well as the new work made with asphalt-concrete clumps pulled apart with a power saw, contours of the human figure like a corpse are present, however vague they may be. This presence of the human figure can amount to no more than just an arrangement of heaps of stone and represents a figurative sculpture that has ‘taken a step back’. This sculptural retreat however brings out new aspects, key elements that were previously left out by the epistemological and intelligible reading of his work focusing on the human figure and its anthropomorphic aspect. What stands out can be described as a furiously entangled dance; a dance between the power that is applied to the material and the material that resists that power. The condensed heap of rubbles penetrated and sliced and sections of asphalt and rubbles that have been cut, such are the manifestations of the dance.

But if we are to say Chung Hyun’s work is all about the ‘aesthetics of the material’ or the ‘expression of the material’ then it would be no different from the aesthetics of the Informel or Abstract Sculpture. The unique qualities of Chung Hyun lie here – that there is a kind of stage providing simultaneously the place as well as limitations for this dance with the material. That stage is in fact the form of the human figure and the dance with the material only takes place on this stage. In doing so his work is able to retain both materiality and formality, and body and spirit, instead of being reduced to either one of the two extremes. I would like to use the term ‘Whole Sculpture’ to designate this characteristic of having both elements together. Furthermore we can conceptualize such ontological position as ‘the sculptural’.

Cybernetics of ‘Whole Sculpture’ – From the human figure to the body

The aim of the intense dance with material is not to copy the human figure. The form of the human figure is merely the temporary stage set up by Chung Hyun, the dancer. As the dancer’s job does not lie in copying the form of the stage, the stage only becomes aware of its boundaries intermittently or accidentally from time to time in the midst of the dancer’s erotic exercise. ‘The totality of the whole sculpture’ (unrelated to the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk) is the result of conserving altogether the dance and its stage, the aesthetics of the sculptural ingredients and the form that these ingredients represent. Chung Hyun’s sculptural form does remind us of the intense process of the existential endurance, but we should go one step further to really focus on the intensity and endurance of the dance which sustains the whole preservation. That is in fact the intensity and endurance of the sculpture itself. Within the site of the ‘Whole Sculpture’, there are two pathways leading to the human figure. One is the ‘reproduced human form’, in other words the ‘human figure’, and the other is the dancer who dances with such human figure and its materials (in other words, the main body in the relationship between the artist and audience). Whereas the former is merely an object of visual perception, the latter exists only in the first person ‘I’ , in the ‘here and now’. The latter is ‘I as a firsthand participant who is sensually immersed in the sharp refractions of the asphalt clump that is before me at this very moment’.

When he started working with the railroad ties, Chung Hyun used to ask himself if he could ever win his struggle with the material. In line with this, sculptors often use the expression, “the material is defiant”. Such expression has nothing to do the phallic culture that has to always change the natural state of matter into an artificial form. On the contrary, to say win over, or resist is the field terminology of sculptors as they try to express a kind of ‘cybernetics’, where physical senses are exchanged with the object, going beyond the cold visuality. Chung Hyun is an artist who indefatigably preserves and emphasizes the scene of that sculptural cybernetics.

The core of Chung Hyun’s work is not the problem of the human figure, but that of the body, and although this body is not visible it signifies the entire field of my presence where intense mutual exchange between me and the object takes place. Chung Hyun’s material struggles endlessly as if to copy somebody’s face or pose while caught in a vortex created by the precarious balance, material’s self-preservation, and the evidence of the great weight that’s been applied to the material. Sculpture was originally about an ‘interaction between representation and its rebellious material’ (think of Michelangelo and Medardo Rosso). But in art history a majority of sculpture pursued the extreme victory of one side. In the case of realist sculpture, any trace of sculpture’s cybernetic movement is completely erased for the epistemological aim of creating ‘a specific human figure’, ‘the pose describing a certain action’ , or ‘ a certain historical event’. Or in the opposite case, such as Minimalism, the shape of the human figure is eliminated to show the material itself in a state of excessive self-awareness. Chung Hyun preserves the scene of these two extremes entangled. And it is as if what we normally consider figurative sculpture was already there (pre-existed, so its present state is read as the destructed form of that human figure), or is to be achieved after (so that one expects to see a realistic rendering of a human figure very soon). To maintain the simultaneity of having both pre- and post- qualities as long as possible is the very task of Chung Hyun’s art, because sculpture in such precarious position is in fact ‘the reality of sculpture’ and ‘whole sculpture’.

Same analysis can also be applied to Chung Hyun’s drawings because his drawings are done in the same manner as his sculpture. At first glance it looks like a rendition of the shape of a human head but upon closer examination, one finds the evidence of strength applied with sticky charcoal ink, repetitive lines, and the eruption of energy from that ‘head’; all these elements elicit the kind of physiological excitement and pulsating rhythm also felt in his sculpture with its sharp marks made with the axe and saw blade. Again Chung Hyun considers the human head as mere given object. The drawings look like they depict the form of human head expelling some kind of energy, but they are only the boundaries of the stage which is intermittently perceived in the midst of the intense physical cybernetics. Another important characteristic of Chung Hyun’s drawing is that it has a kind of cinematic animation quality. When the drawings are all lined up in a sequence like a reel of a film, each looks like a still from a movie, but when they are viewed together there is a progression of movement reminiscent of Muybridge’s study of human movement or the Zootrope. This sensation of movement results from reading, or experiencing using all of my physiological senses, and that is the cybernetics of Chung Hyun’s work.

Towards affirmation of sculpture

I hope that this year’s ‘Today’s Artist’ exhibition will be an opportunity for Chung Hyun’s work to be seen in a new light. By which I mean that some of these critical rhetorics that his work has been associated with should be reconsidered in a wider context, rather than disappear altogether. For example, phrases like “an artist who dares to singularly pursue the human figure” or “the portrait of the dejected human spirit in contemporary society” are mere thematic discussions from critical-theoretical point of view. Instead, his work merits attention for its unique methodologies, including his profound investigation and intuition towards sculpture itself, and the greater premise on which the very different experiments are based from his early to the present work. Only then do we recognize that he is ‘not just an old-fashioned sculptor of human figures but a very avant-garde pioneer’.

In the genre of figurative sculpture that can easily be subjected to arguments relating to formal aesthetics or romantic symbolism, Chung Hyun’s work brings the focus back to ‘the power of sculpture itself’ and ‘the realistic quality of sculpture’ by emphasizing the possibility of layered readings and physical cybernetics. It aspires for what Nietzsche called ‘affirmation’, because affirmation is not a rational action like approval and persuasion, but rather a process accompanied by a bodily exercise that restores wholly the original totality by going back to the starting point. Chung Hyun is a sculptor of repetition who starts from the very beginning every time, through that very affirmation about the medium of sculpture itself, and for the re-affirmation of that affirmation.