“… they waved to us as they passed by, the sun was just going down and already the shadows were quivering at the edges.” ¹




What would Plato make of an age in which images have come to cover everything? As is well known, he held that the sensible world is an imitation of the Forms, and that images imitate that world; painting, therefore, as a doubled representation of essence, is inferior. Yet if, rather than images imitating the world, we now apprehend the world through images, even extracting objects from images, is this a deepened corruption in which subject and object are inverted, or a transformation in which the invisible essence called ‘data’ (the Forms) is embodied otherwise? Recalling that Plato’s theory of mimesis separated the sensible realm, governed by appearances, from the realm of the Forms in which truth resides, and oriented itself towards the latter, it is difficult to imagine that he would have welcomed today’s era of simulacral perception, in which only the sensations of the surface persist, regardless of the presence or absence of substance, and which exceeds postmodernism’s nihilistic superficiality.²

The problem, however, is not Plato’s views from millennia ago, but our ontological dilemma as we live in an age where substance has evaporated. When the body’s physical sensation does not accord with what appears to the eye, when the pace of the external world fails to coincide with my sense of speed, on what basis are we to feel and to form judgement? In an age in which ‘fake’ does not preclude feeling, the only thing to trust is the body’s own sensation. Heemin Chung registers and responds, with her whole body, to the fractured sensibilities of a post-substantial era in which the stability of substance has collapsed. Her practice concerns the affect that arises when one detects the changes that uncertain space–time exerts upon individual perception and the body. This essay identifies the core of Chung’s work by focusing on how her painting responds to contemporary perception.




1.

Chung’s early work has largely been discussed in terms of the conjunction between painting and the digital image, an interpretation that clearly corresponds to a primary characteristic of her initial practice. The works presented in her solo exhibition UTC -7:00 JUN 3PM, On the Table (Kumho Museum of Art, 2018), which established her name, translated into painting the digital, virtual images arrayed on a 3D modelling program: pixelated, angular contours; the program’s characteristically artificial colours; the coexistence of lights cast from incompatible viewpoints; and the improbable superimposition of unrelated layers. Although the focus shifted from project to project, all of her early works formed part of an investigation into the medium of painting in the post-internet era. In Yesterday’s Blues (Project Space Sarubia Dabang, 2016), she experimented with the physical transformation of painting and its spatial staging; in Snow Screen (Archive Bomm, 2017), with the relationship between the materiality of the support and the image; and in UTC -7:00 JUN 3PM, On the Table, with the painterly assimilation of the digital image. What is most notable from the perspective of medium research is not the apparent similarity between the digital image and painting, but the point at which the sensibility of the digital environment is absorbed and transformed in painterly terms. A key feature running through her early practice is the non-integrated, multi-layered space and the sense of multiplicity.

The concept of multi-layering, evident in much of Chung’s early work, operates both within and beyond the canvas. The installation for Yesterday’s Blues comprised painting, wall vinyl, framed prints, and text pieces, creating a structure in which multiple layers were physically superimposed. Rather than a unified, totalising space, this produced a spatial sensibility in which heterogeneous layers are stacked–a logic that extends into the interior of the canvas. Objects 3 (2018), shown in UTC -7:00 JUN 3PM, On the Table, presents strata of images with differing textures, as if sources to be cut and pasted in Photoshop had been piled one upon another. This approach becomes even more pronounced in subsequent works. In Erase Everything but Love (2018), landscapes from disparate origins on Google Maps are layered, erased, and overlaid again, recalling the contemporary visual environment and modes of image reception shaped by impulsively captured imagery encountered while browsing. The space of May Your Shadow Grow Less (2018) appears to conflate moments before and after the breaking of a ceramic object, precisely reflecting a contemporary condition in which it is no longer possible to perceive space–time as integrated and stable. The gel medium applied over these works further accentuates the separation between dissonant spaces; as the artist herself remarks, it is as if she had painted the background purely in order to apply the stain. ³  The space of real objects separated from the illusionary space emphasizes the materiality of gel medium. While layered compositions in painting are nothing new, Chung’s work is distinguished by the pronounced fragmentation and heterogeneity of space. The pictorial surface, an incomplete illusion in which painterly images are pieced together with gel medium of differing texture, is akin to a mixed reality in which the virtual and the actual are inextricably entwined.

Fragmentation operates not only within the canvas but also in the layout beyond it. UTC -7:00 JUN 3PM, On the Table was composed of multiple canvases arranged in combination. The sensibility of freely cutting and pasting images in graphic software applies as much to what lies outside the canvas as to what lies within. Each canvas is a fragment, incomplete in itself, and their assemblage remains provisional and fluid, subject to continual change. The wall, functioning as an expansive painter’s palette in its own right, reappears in her later solo exhibition If We Ever Meet Again (021 Gallery, 2020). Here, canvases prepared on graph paper and subjected to various processes–silkscreen, acrylic paint, gel medium–were arranged upon the wall in a structure akin to a frame narrative, a picture within a picture. The wall itself becomes a virtual palette within a graphic tool. This sensibility of multi-layering, fragmentation, and fluidity stems from an embodied familiarity with the modes by which a digital user moves between multiple images and screens, switches modes freely, continually redefines the frame with a pinch-to-zoom gesture, and consumes and engages with images through rapid scrolling and scanning.




2.

Chung’s now-signature flower paintings made their first appearance in her sixth solo exhibition, Seoulites (Museumhead, 2021). The three works, titled Violet and Iris among others, marked a significant turning point for her practice–both in the choice of motif and in her distinctive use of gel medium. Until her fourth solo exhibition, An Angel Whispers (P21, 2019), gel medium had been used not as an independent material but mixed with pigment as part of the acrylic paint. In Seoulites, however, the gel medium became separate from the painted surface, acquiring its own volume. This thin film, lightly laid over the surface like skin, would in later works swell in volume, leading to a curious state of dynamic equilibrium: a surface that is flat yet not flat, a painting that is a painting yet somehow not. ⁴

It was also with the flower paintings that a single subject first emerged as a recurring motif in her work. Chung’s attraction to flowers seems to lie less in their external beauty than in their distinctive ambivalence. A flower is fleeting, blooming briefly before withering, yet possesses the permanence of blooming again and again. A petal is a surface, yet when gathered together the petals form a volume; it is fragile enough to be crushed with the lightest grip, yet also emblematic of the tenacity of life. In the city, a flower is perhaps the only encounter with the wild–a tactile, tangible object that is also a conduit for transcending the real. ⁵

What, then, does the flower signify as a subject in Chung’s work? In other words, what compels her to paint flowers, again and again? Although, for convenience, we refer to these as “flower paintings”, it will be evident to most that her work is not concerned with depicting flowers per se. Yet it would be difficult to argue that her paintings are unrelated to the physical reality of the flower. While not every title is explicitly referential, the images bear a resemblance to recognisable species: monkshood, iris, canna, violet, lily. Even if representation is not the aim, it is clear that something arising from physical contact with the subject acts as both the impetus and the orientation of the work. The flower serves as a kind of medium, a conduit through which an image or impression is projected. Each flower reflects a particular atmosphere, time and place, thought, or emotion that the artist experienced in encountering it. Just as D. H. Lawrence, upon seeing the gentian, was reminded of the blue darkness of hell, so Chung projects her own psychological states onto flowers. Her titles offer faint clues to this loose, poetic correspondence: When Our Palmline Meets, Morning Chant, The Opening of the Night hint at specific, concrete affects prompted by moments of encounter. In this sense, the flower paintings are figurative yet abstract, or perhaps neither strictly figurative nor abstract, oscillating between the two.

The presence of gel medium, separated from the painted surface and possessing its own material autonomy, became pronounced from the exhibition Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, 2021). In this show, the gel medium unfolded into pleats. Thereafter, Chung became absorbed in creating folds of every conceivable form. Aldous Huxley once wrote of his fascination on seeing the pleats of the skirt in Botticelli’s Return of Judith to Bethulia (c. 1472), remarking that “for the artist (…) draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being,” and surmising that Botticelli had perceived in the folds of cloth “the is-ness and infinity” which he had done his best to render in paint. ⁶

Just as Huxley perceived a plenitude of perfection in the pleats of fabric, Chung channels into her folds of gel medium a vision of nature as experienced in an age of technological upheaval, a world on a different plane from the physical one, and the shifts in bodily perception produced by that gap. The layered skins of gel medium, draped like overlapping curtains, give form to a sensation of slippage or detachment between the physical and screen worlds. The affects she experiences here are dual: as her poetic titles suggest, they may signify a passion or impression connecting her to life, vitality, and the body, functioning as an escape route from the grinding digital environment; or they may convey the fatigue, disruption, and disjunction felt when the speed of technology fails to align with the physical body. ⁷ 

In any case, these affects are not abstract or disembodied, but are experienced through the concrete, actual body. The body is implicated not only as a motif but also in the very process of making. Constructing the coloured fragments– gel medium coated with inkjet prints –is a labour-intensive task requiring intense concentration, as the outcome cannot be fully controlled. The bodily movement that emerges in the momentary decisions of affixing gel medium fragments to create a sense of flow is inscribed directly into the folds themselves. This high-tension process triggers a curious trance-like state, akin to Huxley’s perception of eternity when, in an altered state, he gazed upon the pleats of a pair of trousers. The realisation of the fold cannot be perfectly planned, even with a rough framework. It is through a process that embraces chance and uncertainty that, at a certain moment, the fragments coalesce into a complete whole, as if a puzzle had fallen into place. For Chung, this point of formal resolution is the moment when a kind of cosmic perfection is made manifest.




3.

At first glance, the flower paintings, volumetric and depicting a specific subject, appear markedly different from the indeterminate early paintings, whose flatness echoed that of the digital image. In fact, they diverge from her earlier work in several important respects. First of all, Her early paintings tended not to exist independently, but as components within an exhibition, realised in relation to other works under a unifying theme, from self-portraits such as I Crawled out of the Oven (2021), to installations such as Mockup for the Grave Stone (2021), to video works such as Meditation 101 (2021) in Seoulites, focused on the theme of synchronization, dissolving the distinctions between self and other, life and death, and virtual and reality. By contrast, from the flower paintings onwards, each work stands alone, possessing its own completeness and individual presence. Retaining a particular affect or passion, each painting radiates a distinctive autonomy.

Meanwhile, the tendency, in earlier work, to depict or describe a specific scene or circumstance gives way in the flower paintings to a reflection of a state or affect. Direct representation–such as the tabletop scene at 3 p.m. in UTC -7:00 JUN 3PM, On the Table or the imagined view of a wet landscape from inside a dog’s mouth in I Stared at You in His Dank Mouth (2019)–is abandoned in favour of symbolic embodiments that imply more abstract emotions or conditions, as in Wailing and Weeping (2022–23) and Waken Water (2022). As noted earlier, another significant shift is that the former method of meticulously translating a pre-established plan has given way to an approach that embraces chance.

By contrast, the underlying impulses and formal concerns running through Chung’s practice are, perhaps unexpectedly, continuous. The fragments that make up her pleats are created by transferring colour onto gel medium via inkjet or UV printing, a process of replication not unlike her early paintings, in which she imitated digital images. Just as one might apply a texture over a base form in graphic software, she overlays images onto the body of gel medium. The process of assembling these coloured fragments into a single mass is also akin to the compositional principle of her early paintings, in which fragments of images were stacked to create multi-layered surfaces.

The heterogeneous spaces and times formed by the gathering of disparate pieces are as present in the flower works as they are in her early digital paintings. The differently hued and textured surfaces glimpsed above, beneath, and between the gel layers resemble a kind of elegy for the loss of a unified and secure world. Most crucially, what links the two phases of her work is a sense of fluidity and instability. While the gel medium, pleated and set upon the canvas, may appear fixed, it is built up in such thickness that it sags under its own weight, or seems on the verge of tearing like a thin membrane. Formally, the pleated paintings are fluid bodies that oscillate between surface and mass. This hybrid condition–where the two-dimensional and three-dimensional are not clearly divided–has been present since her earliest works.

Song of Childhood (2019), shown in An Angel Whispers, is a 3D motion-graphic animation in which a plane shifts into a volume, then back into a plane, and ultimately liquefies. The unsegmented, continuously shifting state it depicts mirrors a contemporary mode of existence distanced from substance. Like ASMR content that lulls one to sleep with the sound of artificial rain, it conveys an anxiety born of the loss of the body, where form is no longer guaranteed. Installation works that occasionally accompany her canvases, such as in Young Korean Artists 2019: Liquid Glass Sea (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary art, Gwacheon, 2019) and We, on the Rising Wave (Busan Biennale, 2022), are likewise traces detached from the surface, yet never wholly unrelated to it. The shed skins accumulate or harden into masses, as in Myths of Our Time (Thaddaeus Ropac, 2023). In this light, the quasi-bark forms produced via data transmission in her most recent solo exhibition, Receivers (DOOSAN Art Center, 2023), may not be so unfamiliar after all.




The fluidity that wavers between plane and volume, figuration and abstraction, virtual and real, tactile and visual, stillness and movement, nature and artificiality, chance and design, is, ultimately, a responsiveness to contemporaneity. Like the tremor of a butterfly’s wing, Chung, with heightened sensitivity, perceives that the modes of existence have shifted. Her remark that gel medium felt less like matter than illusion seems to project the condition of an age in which reality can only be groped through the virtual, as substance is apprehended through shadow. (8)

In retrospect, Chung has always spoken of shadows. Observing, within the SketchUp tool, how shadow grants a sense of reality to the virtual object, she began to question the very notion of physical presence; witnessing how mediated, simulacral perception can substitute for actual tactility, she discerned a separation between body and world. The shock of encountering the fact that everything faced is mediated, and that nothing feels wholly real, is a disorienting rupture–an estrangement from, and maladjustment to, a world composed of shells (shadows/illusions). Standing in that twilight, Chung seeks to affirm her own existence through its opposite: the shadow. This, for her, is both the way she renews contemporary painting and the way she loves it, in her own terms.

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1. W. G. Sebald, After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Modern Library, 2003), pp. 96.
2. Timotheus Vermeulen describes the former using lyrics from Radiohead’s “There, There. (The Boney King of Nowhere.)” (2003) — “Just ‘cause you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there” — and the latter with a line from season 3, episode 3 of the American TV drama Girls (2014) — “Just because it’s fake doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.” Timotheus Vermeulen, “The New ‘Depthiness’,” e-flux journal #61 (January 2015), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/61/61000/the-new-depthiness/.
3. Interview with Heemin Chung, 31 August 2024.
4. One commentator has described Chung’s flower paintings, which verge on relief yet still rest on planar foundations, as “non-flat.” Kim Namsi, “Heemin Chung’s ‘Non-flat’,” in 2023 Geumcheon Art Factory Annual Report (2023), p. 194.
5. Interview with Heemin Chung, 1 September 2024.
6. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), pp. 33
7. Interview with Heemin Chung, 1 September 2024.
8. Interview with Heemin Chung, 1 September 2024.