Yellow imitated gold. When a 15th-century Venetian painter discovered yellow pigment, he broke away from the old technique of painting gold to replicate golden objects or symbols. His attempt was a new experiment that moved beyond the equivalence-exchange formula of painting gold with gold to extend the art of imitation to the materials at hand that day and place. Five hundred years later, a myriad of materials have taken the place of his yellow, experimented with by many painters. One thing has remained constant through all these material changes: the artist’s will to “paint” gold. Heemin Chung brings the images she encounters on the digital screen to life, groping for a sense of difference with the material. However, each time the implications of her paintings are revealed, there are questions that arise. It is the will to address the problem of painting as a painter, and the consciousness to solve it by utilizing painting materials inherent in the methodology of imitation.1



Beyond the digital screen and canvas surface

Through her paintings based on canvas, Heemin Chung questions the process of understanding the images she is faced with today. In her paintings, images experienced mainly in the digital environment are designated as objects. These images are already composed and “shown” to the viewer in the current visual world dominated by digital screens, which have become more familiar and commonplace than natural spaces. In other words, the images she sees are not for the sake of seeing, but rather are given to her, like a wave, and she is forced to face them. Here, her questioning does not stop at exploring the environment that affects what we see. She is fundamentally thinking about the work of a painter through the paradox of pasting a story on a digital screen, the today’s media, onto a canvas, the old media.

For her, the task is not only about the individual facing the ever-changing conditions of the world, but also about the process of recognizing that she is a painter who paints here and now. The task of understanding the images in front of her turns into a way of summoning genres of painting such as landscapes and still lifes that are familiar to the artist. In 2016, when she first held her exhibition, and again in 2022, six years later, the words she spoke at the exhibition shared a painterly understanding of the genre of painting, as well as terms that categorize the genre of painting, such as “conventional subjects of painting such as landscapes and still lifes” and “various strategies adopted by images of two-dimensional landscapes.” 2 If selecting and materializing the images she encounters on the digital screen describes her world of work in a horizontal direction in the present time, the fact that she considers the techniques and elements of painting, which have long been the concern of painters, places her world of work in a vertical direction in the time of history.

There Might be Two Suns (2019) is a composite testimony to this exploration. . The painting covers three layers: the digital screen, the surface of the canvas, and the object of reality. It was like a commentary that succinctly revealed the painter’s concerns, which have been fragmentary and more about ulterior motive than about the greater cause. First, the painting speaks about the digital world of the digital screen. The front of the painting depicts apples that exist as images on a digital screen. On the surface of the apples, the shadows of a seedling object pass by, which casts sporadic shadows on the apples, their tops, and leaves, but does not reveal its shape. Notably, the sharpness and tone of the shadows remain constant regardless of orientation, whether near or far, left or right, etc. This evokes the characteristic of a digital environment where light illuminates everywhere on the screen, where there might be multiple suns, unlike in real life.

After the drawn apple is recognized, we see that the surface of the canvas is where the apple is painted. A virtual apple that lives in the digital world, or in other words, an apple that mimics the shape of a real apple, has been placed on a real object, the canvas. The problem here is that the apple has long been a fundamental object of exploration for painters who have honed their skills in the art of painting. Painted on the front of the painting, the apple as a “primary subject,” the artist approaches her painting as an allegory to the history of painters who have used the sphere as one of their basic shapes and as a tool to cultivate their skills. The apples brightened by the light and the appropriately contrasting shadows that are only shaded. Depictions that follow the curved shape of the apple, protruding from the depths and gradually spreading downward with backlit and half-lit areas. The color of the apple, painted in a fine range of light green and purple. There’s an exploration of the fundamental processes of painting that one might expect to find at the beginner level. And this exploration reveals the painting to be a study in still life itself, as it is usually the subject of painters who create still life paintings.

The final layer of the painting is the fact that it has become an object in itself. As the exhibition preface explains, “I would like to place today’s still life paintings as “suspended objects” in an exhibition space like a halved watermelon,” 3 the painting filled one wall, right next to the entrance to the small room of audiovisualpavilion, like a newly painted wall. It cuts through the space of reality, as if slicing through a cross-section. At this time, the  light of the sun from the entrance illuminated the painting: the space where the apple she initially brought as the subject of the painting was originally located was a digital world in which multiple suns coexisted, but in the final stage, it had entered the space of the here and now, where only one sun exists. This gives the painting an identity as an object placed in real space, beyond the possibility of reproduction or a laboratory for technological exploration, and takes on a third layer beyond the double layer of digital screen and canvas surface.



The methodology of imitation

By the time Heemin Chung released her apple painting to the world, in 2018, a year earlier to be precise, her interest had expanded to the thickness of the paint layer. For her, thickness actually refers to the thickening of a material, particularly the concept of thickness as it is understood within the genre of painting and what is realized through paint. The source of her interest in thickness is in acrylic, a material she chose to overcome the technical constraints of oil paint, and the reason for her interest in acrylic is that it employs a methodology of imitation to assist oil paint. During this period of transition in her practice, she devised a method called

“modeling.” In her hand was Gel Medium, a supplement that maximizes the effectiveness of acrylics. As a painter, her concerns in the apple painting extended to painting with thick layers of water-based paints, and gradually, she captured the chain reaction between the three substances in her paintings: acrylic as a device to imitate oil painting, and gel medium as a device to support acrylic.

Acrylic is a material intended to improve the art of painting in terms of efficiency beyond the limits of oil. In most of its effects, such as color, gloss, and texture, acrylic mimics oil painting. This means that acrylic is not a new material that has never been used before, but rather a material that has been developed from the history and role of oil, a material which acknowledges oil as its parent, and therefore, with some exaggeration, has the properties of a substitute. As always, oil, the most traditional medium for painting, is an oil-soaked material that requires a great deal of time and effort to build up a physically solid layer. To overcome this slow drying and thinness, acrylics were developed, which are paints based on water rather than oil.4 Because water-based acrylics do not contain slow-drying oils, they can be airbrushed to create thin, clean layers, or thickened to create chunky layers quickly.5

Gel medium, meantime, is a supplement that comes in gel form, as the name implies. When the pigments that give acrylics their color are removed, all remains is the binder, the substance that binds the pigments together and makes the paint stick to the canvas. The clear, sticky binder is made into different types of mediums with varying degrees of gloss, viscosity, and unique additives (such as glass, sand, etc.). Gel medium is not just paint that can be spread, but can be “sculpted” into three-dimensional shapes by adjusting their thickness with a brush, knife, or hand. These materials turn the paintings that have been characterized by the projection
of the third dimension onto the second dimension into objects that actually belong to the third dimension. Of course, in the process, if a painting is always based on a canvas, it does not become a sculpture. It just exceeds the sculpture’s task of dealing with the three-dimensional world.

When she first started painting, she used oil paint. However, in her paintings, such as the apple painting mentioned earlier, the gaps between the layers of paint were important, and this thematic consciousness naturally led her to paintings that actually embody thickness. In 2018, she began to use acrylic and gel medium in earnest, adopting modeling as a method of sculpture. In her solo show at the Kumho Museum of Art, she first presented paintings with gel medium on top of oil and acrylic paint. She transferred images from the 3D program SketchUp’s Warehouse onto the canvas and applied the acrylic with an airbrush. At some points on the flat, thin surface, she added thick, translucent masses of paint in the form of drips. It was a solid, dried gel medium. It underpinned and antagonized the thin colored surface, literally becoming a separate layer with its own thickness.

Meanwhile, this contrast of thinness and thickness was simple and direct in that it was an experiment in achieving thickness with painting materials. After this first attempt, she began to explore thickness on a more complex level by expanding the use of gel medium by changing its usage in a bold way. For example, she mixes gel medium with acrylic paint to create colored layers, or adjusts the transparency of the gel medium to make subtle differences in various parts of the same screen. With these changes, the medium gradually expanded its role as a material for her to explore the layers of the digital world and the real world, as well as a material for weaving physically different sculptures on the same surface. Eventually, she used knives and squeegees to model the medium into precise shapes and paste them onto the screen.



Gel medium as a flower

Heemin Chung’s paintings, which acquire the manner of sculpture but are not sculptures, enter the three-dimensional world with a surface intended for two dimensions, but are still paintings. Almost simultaneously with the apple paintings, flowers appeared in her paintings from 2019. Utilized in the 2018 exhibition as a simple contrast of thickness, the gel medium becomes directly involved in the form of the painting through the flower shape. Furthermore, the gel medium extends to the frame of the canvas, emphasizing the boundaries of the canvas frame. On a surface level, these attempts clearly go beyond the effect of the plane. However, there are still stories about the plane in her paintings in that she seeks to “becoming” a painting that “imitates” the shape of a flower rather than remaining a “well-drawn” flower painting.

From Infinite Light 2 (2019), which was shown at Boan1942’s exhibition Psychedelic Nature in 2019, to her solo show at Museumhead in 2021, and at P21 and group show at N/A in 2022, she has hung paintings depicting single or multiple flowers Fig. 3 , Fig. 4 . Her process for painting flowers is roughly as follows. Pour a large area of gel medium on a flat panel and let it dry. Once the square of liquid is solid, she pulls it from all sides and brings it to the center, creating a series of curved folds to shape it into petals. Or she pours a little bit of gel medium and lets it dry to form a sheet of petals, which she then glues together to form a flower. Sometimes she mixes colors into the gel medium that will become the flower, but usually she UV prints or transfers color onto a large translucent gel medium surface. Or she paints the surface of the canvas and places a figure on top of it, allowing the background color to peek through the petals.

In the exhibition “Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” at the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art in 2021, the gel medium protruded from the four corners of the canvas. A year later, in the exhibition “How Do We Get Lost in the Forest” at P21 in 2022, they extended beyond the corners to the back of the canvas, where they became attached. In the paintings on P21 in particular, the thin gel mediums were layered to create a progressive depth, and as they were stretched across the canvas frame―like a silk cloth hanging down from somewhere to set the mood―they used the wall on which the canvas was hung as their base.
 



1  This article was originally published in the March 2023 issue of Public Art and updated in December 2023. It is similar in organization to the original article, with a few differences in the way the discussion is developed. The original article is as follows. Kim, J. (2023). Heemin Chung’s Paintings: Groping for Material to Refine Painting. Public Art, 198, pp. 78-83.

2 Heemin Chung’s first solo show, Yesterday's Blues held at Project Space SARUBIA in 2016, stated that her paintings are based on her interest in “conventional subjects of painting, such as landscapes and still lifes,” and that she “figuratively explores her changing sense of existence and questions the meaning of image and matter.” Subsequently, the show How Do We Get Lost in the Forest at P21 in 2022 revealed a thematic consciousness that explored the “various strategies adopted by images of two-dimensional landscapes” to “create an illusion on the surface of the canvas.” Each citation refers to the following sources. Exhibition introduction of Yesterday's Blues (March 2-March 31, 2016, Project Space SARUBIA). URL: http://sarubia.org/73; Exhibition preface for How Do We Get Lost in the Forest (May 20-June 18, 2022, P21).

3 Exhibition preface for Tarte: Still-life Exhibition (May 15-June 30, 2019, audiovisualpavilion). URL: http://audiovisualpavilion.org/exhibitions/tarte

4 Acrylic was first created in the late 1940s when Bocour Artist Colors developed an acrylic resin emulsion. Sold under the name “Magna,” it could be diluted with turpentine and used with oil paint. In the mid-1950s, the development of “Aquatec,” mixed with a waterborne emulsion, ushered in the era of acrylic paints that were formulated to be applied in water rather than oil. Meanwhile, the history of acrylic is intertwined with the history of paint in the 1930s, when synthetic materials, represented by plastics, began to replace natural materials. At the time, the paint industry was trying to develop a material that would be easier to use for outdoor murals, given the difficulty of obtaining natural materials after the war. Mustalish, R. (2004). Modern Materials: Plastics. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. URL:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/mome/hd_mome.htm

5 The history of acrylic goes hand in hand with the history of painting, with artists such as Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Helen Frankenthaler who tried to revolutionize painting in the United States in the 1950s, when acrylic began to be used in earnest. For them, acrylic was an excellent material because it allowed them to more quickly and accurately maintain the “impasto,”─ the thick, coarse “matiere” that makes the paint stand out ― a technique that impressionist painters used to emphasize, or to clearly separate the colors of each area without blending them.

References

• 작가 홈페이지 (Artist Website)