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.