Suejin Chung has regarded “painting” as the most suitable medium for exploring the human mind or consciousness, and has continuously experimented with and constructed her own distinctive visual system. More specifically, she has sought to recognize the many unfamiliar dimensions that exist between “vision” and “perception,” and to explore them through the medium of painting.
 
She studied painting in university from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, then studied abroad in Chicago before returning to Korea in 1995. Chung was formally introduced in the exhibition 《’98 City and Image–Food, Clothing, Shelter》(1998), curated by Lee Young-chul, where she presented four comic-style paintings. At the time, Korea was entering an era in which popular culture and consumer culture had become established, and the transition toward commodity capitalism and cultural pluralism was becoming prominent.

In the art world, there was a shift away from grand narratives—such as cultural imperialism, nation, history, and identity—as well as from the collective ideologies of modernism (Dansaekhwa) and Minjung art, toward diverse methodologies that focused on everyday life and small narratives. Chung’s paintings presented in this exhibition were noted as one example representing the rapidly changing cultural conditions and contemporary sensibilities of the time.
 
“Suejin Chung’s four-panel comic series depict scenes of children at play, born from a ‘fractal’ chaos. The characters and objects in the comics exchange feelings and intentions through murmurs, movements, and gestures. These small comics, which break the rules of historical time and space, replace the communicative gaps between moments—before, during, and after an idea emerges—with interactions between images, effectively revealing the density and sensorial nature of symbolic communication.”1
 
This exhibition, organized to examine the “pluralized” landscape of Korean art in the 1990s, is regarded as a landmark exhibition that signaled a generational shift in contemporary Korean art. Alongside Chung, artists such as Kim Sora, Lee Soo-kyung, Kim Sang-gil, Lee Dong-gi, and Ham Kyung-ah—now leading figures in the Korean contemporary art scene—participated in large numbers.
 
Meanwhile, Chung was invited to a series of notable exhibitions at major public and private institutions, including 《Parking Project 1: Comics》(Art Sonje Center, 1999), 《Korean New Generation Flow: Mixer & Juicer》(Korea Culture and Arts Foundation Art Hall, 1999), and 《Young Korean Artists 2000–Towards the New Millennium》(National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000). In these exhibitions, elements such as a) everyday objects like comic books, squid, onions, walnuts(?), supermarket shelves, and bottles, b) figures such as small people, women, and men, and c) signs such as tangled thread-like spirals, straight lines, wavy lines, and circles2 appeared together within non-perspectival pictorial space.
 


A Common Place for Objects

The strange objects in Chung’s paintings recall a Chinese encyclopedia mentioned in a text by Borges, cited by Michel Foucault in the preface to The Order of Things (1966). The passage quoted by Foucault reads as follows:
 
“In a certain Chinese encyclopedia,” animals are classified as: “a) belonging to the emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) suckling pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) etcetera, m) having just broken a water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.”3
 
If this classification of animals provokes laughter due to its strangeness and absurdity, it is because such an astonishing system disrupts the very foundations of our habitual modes of thought. For cognition to be possible, objects must be arranged according to a certain order on a common ground.

However, in this classification, “the common ground upon which things could be connected has collapsed.”4 Borges, as cited by Foucault, seems to have associated the word “China” with “disorder.” Perhaps he questioned whether a shared ground or place could exist to connect the “encyclopedia” as a system of order and “China” as an exotic other.5 From a Western perspective that believes in a single universal order, it would not have been easy to identify a common ground where different systems of classification—based on entirely different dimensions—could coexist.

Interestingly, Chung’s paintings challenge the “single” order of objects constructed through the collusion of Western-centrism and ocular-centrism, and offer her canvas as a “common ground/place” where “specific” objects and “specific” times—once disparate and even oppositional—can coexist. This seems related to the artist’s lived experiences and observations of globalization, the collapse of the Cold War system, and the conflicts between Eastern and Western systems of order in places like Korea and Chicago, as well as her dialectical pursuit of essence.

For this reason, Chung’s paintings “do not present traditional compositions with hierarchical relationships or perspectival space. Although the independent will of each object may evoke confusion and anxiety, the artist continuously constructs her work from the position of a mediator, envisioning a harmonious ideal where the autonomy of each entity is guaranteed and the overall structure remains intact.”7
 
The diverse physical changes in the spatiotemporal environments surrounding us resonate with the arrangement of “specific” objects in the multidimensional spaces of her paintings. Like the imagined Chinese encyclopedia of Borges, we might imagine Chung’s own encyclopedia of objects. The objects in her paintings are arranged independently, without hierarchy or sequence, sometimes on lined grids or overlapping multidimensional planes.
 
Medicine bottles, bread-red fragments, onions, pears—bitten pears, heads with short hair showing the back of the neck like chestnuts, walnuts-brains, miniature buildings and their cross-sections, ice cream cones, snow crystals, dripping paint, holes, eyes-pupils, chocolate bars, crocheted glass coverings, wooden sticks, squared timber, rabbits-hippos, ribbons-bow ties, butterflies, and male faces with brown hair—these constitute the objects in her paintings. In addition, formal signs such as spirals, thin straight lines, circles, as well as coded cartoon-like forms such as sparkling elements, elongated pink diamond shapes, Pac-Man-like circles, and winking cheerful boys can be added as codes.


 
Between Vision and Perception: Multidimensional Flatness

In fact, these “strange” objects within a shared ground/place are images of a world related to a theory Chung has long studied and constructed. In 2014, she published her own theoretical framework for interpreting her painting, Budo Theory: A New Visual Theory for Reading Multidimensional Consciousness (Budoji, 2014). This theory is linked to the concept of “Budo Wido (不圖為圖)” explained in Seongmyeong Seoldo by Seong Isim. “Budo Wido” can be translated as “making the non-image into an image” or “taking what is not a picture as a picture.”

At first glance, it appears as an empty space where nothing is drawn, but in fact, it is “drawing what is not drawn.”8 According to this logic, “Budo Wido” signifies a paradoxical relationship between what is not an image and what is an image. For Chung, this may correspond to the relationship between “vision” (not yet an image) and “perception” (her painting), or between objects that exist “here and now” and objects that have been transformed into another dimension. The relationship between vision and perception unfolds into entirely different forms and dimensions depending on time (past, present, future), space (West, East), and language (Korean, English, French).

This interpretation is possible because the artist distinguishes between the real world directly perceived by the eye and the world of forms appearing within the picture plane, explaining that “the world of forms is not a world where objects exist, but a world where countless perspectives on objects exist.”9 She does not simply express her emotions or feelings but focuses on the totality of these perspectives and dimensions—the “structure”—revealing a multidimensional structure and totality.
 
One of the works that strongly imprinted Chung’s painterly world is the ‘Brain Ocean’ series, which draws attention with its dense visual intensity. The works that once pressed forward with suffocating density evolve around 2021 into series such as ‘Pink Sea’ and ‘Observer,’ where bolder compositional divisions, repetitive patterns, symbolic eyes and pupils, and materialized paint/color masses emerge. Alongside these, the appearance of hybrid forms—walnut-brain, rabbit resembling Pac-Man, duck with a rabbit’s face—adds further interest.

The active use of the technique of dépaysement to connect and arrange heterogeneous objects enhances the contemporary relevance of her painting. The fragments and arrangements of finely rendered figurative forms, the combination of two-dimensional volumes and flat signs, and ambiguous hybrid forms open up a surreal visionary world. The artist’s central question—the numerous unfamiliar dimensions between “seeing” (vision) and “perceiving”—is becoming increasingly visible.
 
This is undoubtedly related to the visual theory the artist has long explored and constructed. Even if her sincere dialectical struggle may interfere with the overwhelming aesthetic experience of her work, her multidimensional paintings—where multiple “specific” objects and times overlap—secure their significance as a “common ground/place” that prompts reflective contemplation on the relationship between vision and perception, which can never be identical.

 
1 Lee Young-chul, “The Space of Complexity, the Time of Discontinuity: On the Planning and Direction of 《’98 City and Image–Food, Clothing, Shelter》,” exhibition catalog, You Are My Sun, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, p.143. Bold emphasis added by the author.
2 Kang Seung-wan, 《Young Korean Artists 2000–Towards the New Millennium》 exhibition leaflet (MMCA, 2000)
3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Lee Gyuhyun, Minumsa, 2012, p.7
4 Ibid., p.9
5 Classical Chinese encyclopedias such as Sancai Tuhui (1609) and Shuofu (c.1407) each had their own systems of order
6 Foucault, op. cit., p.9
7 Cho Sang-il, Diagonal Logic and Joseon Calendar, 2013; cited in Jung Yeon-shim, “Suejin Chung’s Painting,” S2A Gallery, 2025
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.

 
*This manuscript is a special contribution supported by the Korea Arts Management Service (2025).

References

• [비평] 정수진의 회화, 다차원적 평면성과 기괴한 사물들의 장소
  [Critique] A Place of Multidimensional Flatness and Strange Objects in Suejin Chung’s Painting