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.