Reality Is Not Simply There,
It Must Be Searched and Won¹: On Chung Seoyoung’s Work

Chus Martínez

The work of Chung Seoyoung asks fundamental questions: Can you do sculpture without doing it? Is the life of objects independent of the materials from which they are made? Are the forms and objects made by an artist sensical or absurd? Is there a correlation between all the objects that exist? Appearing carefully arranged, the thirty-three works presented at the artist’s semi-retrospective What I Saw Today in Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) could be seen as much more than an exhibition of her works, but as an opportunity for all those works to be together and in the de-sublimating manner of Chung’s philosophy – activate our senses for future interpretations on objecthood and space in an environment informed by conspicuous consumption and material cultures. For instance, despite the artisanry that went into their fabrication, the works transmit their industrial origins. The exhibition could be seen as a work by Chung, a piece in which she addresses the mutable sociality of every material and form she has created over the last three decades.

Figures becoming forms, forms scaping figures

When you encounter the work of Chung Seoyoung in the exhibition at SeMA, there is a noticeable tension between figure and abstraction. The figures and forms of each work – some of them naturalistic – stay in tension versus the form created by the whole composition of the exhibition. The “exhibition” is an abstract notion and yet in seeing the works of Chung together we are under the impression that all the works have long been waiting to be part of What I Saw Today. It is legitimate to ask: is the exhibition a work in itself? The way that Chung invites her works into the space possesses a very powerful eloquence, and, for a second, we are tempted to see all as a new large-scale installation, a new piece. The works have found their place in the space, so it is demanding for us to teach our senses to go back to every work, to focus on every form, and to analyze the conditions that make each figure emerge. And in this manner, we understand that for the artist sculpture is the task of undoing the figure, of undoing sculpture itself. This tension indicates that there is something else out there an artist needs to get to and that the act of trying is what constitutes the practice even if one may never reach it. Yes, the work of Chung implies that the making of sculpture entails a radical re-positioning of one’s interpretative perspective of the world we are in. Time; time and materials; time and materials and experience; time, materials, experience, and thought … All these dimensions collide in her works. This collision obliges us to start reflecting.
A wonderful way of seeing how Chung Seoyoung works out this tension is in her work Wave (a remaining part of the installation work Ghost, Wave, Fire, 1998–2022). The original plasticine work has been recast into Jesmonite for the solo exhibition What I Saw Today. How many waves are there in the ocean? Do all waves have a wave form? Or are they just wind-and-water and, therefore, there is no such form as the form of a wave? And yet the oceans are inhabited by the figures of waves, trillions of waves. Wave modeling has been a subject of interest to a vast range of characters, from ancient painters to oceanographers, mathematicians, and meteorologists pertaining to both indigenous and coastal communities and Western scientific ones. Why so? Because a holistic – a global – state of the sea can often be illumined through measures of its smallest component: a wave. A wave, like a flame, has never the same shape or figure, and therefore it possesses no form. It is only a transient substance that constantly changes because of the factors that affect it: the wind, the body mass of the ocean, and the heat in the case of fire. For that reason, to do a work – a sculpture of a wave – is like negating sculpture and waves, since for it to be a wave it needs to be able to continue to change, oscillate, and have its crest go down to the ocean to come up again, and again, and again. What is then, the wave? Inside this wave are all the waves and the whole Earth as it was originally made of clay. But later on, now, it is reproduced with a newly invented material: Jesmonite, a combination of gypsum (a mineral created from sedimentary rocks) and water-based acrylic resin. In this sense, this wave embodies all climate futures, environments, and narratives that nature-culture created to address the wisdom and miseries of our species in relation to our planet.
Doing a wave makes us reflect on “limbic” experiences and emotions: experiences and feelings that form a border around them. In seeing this wave, we want its energy to be maintained and wish that this individual wave would not disappear into the ocean. This wish has a primordial function in culture. It relates to our aspiration to keep control of everything. In this sense, the wave offers us guidance to understand this emotion and, also, to find a place for it within this work.

Models
Take Sink, a work from 2011. An existing sink, originally part of a model house, has now been re-arranged and presented as a work. A part of the piece is situated on top of four rocks. The question of the model has been haunting sculpture forever. And the best way to collapse this question of things that resemble other things is by granting another life to the original things. In the case of this piece, the question of the model goes into deeper trouble: the sink belongs to a model house. A model house is a house that shows you how to use a space exemplarily, it performs the fantasy of the best living practice. Those spaces not only embody the norms of a certain society but also dramatize them, creating a scenario for our happy co-existence inside those norms and values. The space becomes the scenario in which we inscribe ourselves living there for a few minutes, for a short while. That model sink was a part of this model living. It was perceived and viewed inside that context of desire, it was performing a moment of our lives where we wish we could be at home there, using it, cleaning the plates that feed our loved ones. But it also performs all the tensions of accepting this invitation and renouncing another life or lives that have no place in this model place.
Actually, the problem with this sink is not that it is not real enough, but that it is too real. Models of objects, rooms, and whole houses portray best practices and uses while, at the same time, embodying a canonical approach to life in those spaces with those objects. That’s probably why in the second life of this sink, there is a part, which rests on top of four rocks. Rocks are never models. We only notice this fact when we see them co-existing with an object produced by humans. A rock is never a model of another rock or a mountain. Rocks sustaining a part of a model sink on top are presenting two very different dimensions of time being simply together. The sink synchs with culture, with a culturally produced behavior, with its norms and expectations. The rocks here add to the scene a sense of time that has nothing to do with the biological time that determines the finitude of all living creatures. It is true, our worlds lie upon the worlds of nature and its laws. How many of these living models does a rock remember? Stones, all through their geological lives, may have witnessed plenty of living models, plenty of attempts to make matter do what we humans want.

Analogies
Analogies are very present in the working method of Chung Seoyoung (and so is pain). In The Body in Pain, literary scholar Elaine Scarry begins with an examination of the pre-articulate and private nature of pain – verbally inexpressible and yet absolutely certain for the one experiencing it.² After the pain, victims may offer analogies such as, “it was like a flame,” or “it was like a knife.” Scarry refers here to the immediate incommunicability of pain as the locus for the destruction of worlds. The work of Chung Seoyoung seems to see immense potential in the destruction of worlds – and the pain – originated by fast capitalism. The frequent episodes of economic collapse and recovery that society has been through leave traces in the social and material cultures of a given community – and South Korea is not an exception. Chung’s work emanates a sense of responsibility toward this transformation. The question of pain and loss (the loss of traditions, materials, and ancient knowledge) is replaced with the need to produce a dynamic method able to act and infuse energy into the materials that exist under such conditions. The method, at first, is difficult to grasp because of the subtility of the craftmanship and synthetic arrangement of the formal elements, but it eventually breaks through, reshaping our perception and igniting the emergence of other-than-capitalist values and behaviors. This is one of the main impressions we get from Chung’s exhibition.
Take, for example, Ice-Cream Refrigerator and Cake Refrigerator (2007). Both look like ice refrigerators but there is no point in comparing the actual ones that are in small convenience stores in the streets of South Korea to the ones in the exhibition. They are simply related, in pain and painful joy. These forms convey the persuasiveness behind an exploration of embodied experience from the point of view of the objects, of the material artifacts that usually contain ice cream: a certain type of capitalistically produced, sweet happiness. Ice-Cream Refrigerator and Cake Refrigerator omits the real refrigerator and yet the “real” is immediately perceived as the obvious foundation of the work, the source, the origin. In her whole practice – so well unfolded in the exhibition What I Saw Today – she induces a discernment on how an “understanding” of a thing can be made by making use of another thing, and how an understanding of materials works in the same way. And so, she also creates a flow of shifting emotions from familiar objects and materials to their new situations and lives.
But another interesting trait of analogies is that they tend to offer oversimplifications. This is one of the most beautiful characteristics of the philosophy and epistemology Chung sets at play: in her work, she produces a new ground for all her objects, an ambiguity, which slowly makes us understand how she has been through the years freeing her works from the conditions and even the material culture they stem from.

Rhythms
To Clean Up Once a Year (2007) is a work made of cement and an artificial plant. It seems at first the product of a surreal dream. Chung Seoyoung’s work can be read as an ongoing process of documentation, which manifests itself in and through objects. Nature appears here already as a spectrum, it seems to be here, but it is not. This plant is artificial, and so is cement. Both entities are made. None of them has their real origin outside the realm of humans. What is the work documenting? Ways of dealing with production and how to re-animate dead matter. In the Western Romantic tradition, one could say that she reaches the possibility of elevating inner matter into a critical and epistemological realm. But this is through a careful and deep understanding of the role of rhythm and not formal beauty – like in the Romantic tradition – which is something that happens in Chung’s work.
Rhythm is a question that defines the relationship we establish with the real. If the real possesses rhythm, we assume life. If the real is dispossessed of rhythm, we assume inertness, lifeless matter. However, already around 1800, poets such as Novalis started doubting this binary. The discourse around rhythm emerged then to account for matter’s property that never remains the self-same. For example, biological matter changes every second – cells divide and even change – without us even noticing. However, over time, changes appear and we are able to detect that those changes occur sequentially, and rhythmically. But inorganic matter is also affected by a play of change. This reflection on rhythm, as a property, which affects all that is around us, creates relations and forces capable of producing dynamic winds. And these dynamic energies came late to the world of philosophy. In the West, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, and later Henri Lefebvre, were the first to pay attention to the concept of rhythm, a notion important to understand time in a philosophical context.³ Rhythm slowly arose as a concept different from duration. Rhythm presents time not only as a continuous state but also as that which contains tension perceivable when certain discontinuities appear. In Chung’s practice, a material that exists and has a life outside of art is suddenly used to produce a work of art. Here its continuous life as an industrial material, for example, is disrupted and another life, which embeds another sense of time, emerges. The artist’s methodology adds to the temporal life of normal matter the symbolic dimension of time that art embodies. Her works reflect those temporal tensions.
Time is not seen as a fact, as a calm flow, or as a continuous state, which simply happens to us or to things. Time in Chung’s practice and works is the result of an infinite oscillation between continuity and discontinuity that happens inside a work. Rhythm helps us to understand that inorganic matter is sensitive to the specific connections an artist establishes with it in giving it a form, giving it a place in the world, in relating the work with other works – like in the case of an exhibition such as What I Saw Today. We can say that rhythm makes us aware that life is not a condition of organic beings, of biology, but a condition we share with all that exists in the world. In the work of Chung Seoyoung, rhythm, dynamic energies, and a non-static experience of the real are very present. The work reminds us that not only humans are conscious of the existence of things, of an object. But also, objects know about the life they have been living in, about the contexts they have been exposed to.⁴
The Time Is Now (2012), where desks are placed (or displaced) on four wooden trestles and several pieces of wood assist in keeping the balance between these elements. A working desk, a desk where you were supposed to sit down and work. On top of the desks, is a large sheet of glass, and below, the trestles. A desk’s function cannot be performed. The desk is synchronized with the thousands of desks at which the desk workers of the world work. Now, one cannot perform. It is still a desk, but more of a ballerina elevated in the air with the simple help of those thin wooden legs. Up in the air, it can probably observe other desks occupied by all those humans sitting in front for long hours. Desks and Fordist capitalism are the subjects of many books, but I would say, a desk elevated like this deserves a poem. A desk on wooden legs exposes the contrast between the desks oriented to support production in large-scale Fordist factories versus the studio and home desks supporting creative labor. And so, one can say desks also speak about male versus female work. Desks are gender markers. While adult men have entered the factories en masse, only a small proportion of women did so. The desk surface is the flat scenario of a social conflict, of a specific form of labor that stays in opposition to field labor, unpaid domestic labor, and the creative tasks performed on the tables of the studio by an artist.

Fires – and the imagination of matter
Campfire, a work from 2005, portrays a fire in the color blue. Fire is orange and red and yellow and blue. But here, it is only blue. Could fire imagine itself being different from what we believe it is? Fire, like water, belongs to the elements that, in simple terms, explain the materiality of Earth. The work of Chung Seoyoung is both philosophical and embodying poetics: while her works demonstrate the need for systematization associated with rational thought, she also insists on the collapse of any system in the face of an infinite richness of experience. And experience is here to be understood as a deep experience, one that is not satisfied on the surface of perception. Her notion of experience demands an attempt to circumscribe existence with a profound imagination – imbued with poetic experience – that transcends an individual imagination of a subject. That’s why the fire is blue. The birth of fire in human history as well as the constant analogies of the libidinal components represented by fire gain here an almost comic-like, humorous dimension: a blue, bubble-formed campfire. Campfires are associated with youth culture, a certain moment in life in which the mastery of fire is associated with the impulse to urinate on the flame to extinguish it.
Like in many other works, Campfire becomes an opportunity for a creative daydream where our mind oscillates between different possibilities and scenarios the pieces may emerge from. A campfire is a primordial fire, the first fire that ever gave … She first activates our desire to “bracket” the work and see it as alone, unique, and separated from her other works; then she awakes in us the aspiration to apprehend its entirety inside her whole practice. This calculated method could be called: the awakening of the creative epiphany of an image. Chung’s poetics result from her cross-fertilization of the general epistemologies at work in common objects onto her metaphysic of the imagination of materials. Chung does imagine matter imagining, dreaming, willing, and wanting. Matter is transformed not only by industries or artists but also by itself. Matter possesses agency and this is the energy that she rescues and channels in all her wonderful works.

Airy solids
Words in the Flesh (2022) is a work on the floor where salt and wood glue are directly applied to create a salt stain. Salt remains in the absence of water, and yet we cannot but think of water when we see the piece. I once heard marine biologist Diva Amon praising the centrality of salt in all creatures’ life.⁵ Salt is a mineral that entered the history of human life since we are unable to live without it and yet salt water, like in this work by Chung Seoyoung, is like the ocean, which can never be a source to calm our thirst. Salt routes, salt mines, salt rituals, and salt religions – it is impossible not to think, at least for a moment, about all those dimensions. Yet this piece – probably because of its nearness to another work that is made of stainless steel wire, An Ordinary Day (2022) – refers less to nature and more to the possibility of adding a mineral layer to the exhibition. It gives the impression of a leak, an accident, a pipe or an infrastructure unable to perform causing an undesired trace on the floor. A trace always makes us go on in our minds and create a story around their presence. Think about animal tracks: when we see the paws on the ground of a field or the snow, we immediately wonder about when. When was the animal there? When did the water abandon the ground allowing the salt to remain seen? This work will never happen again in the same manner. It has a past and a future that will always be different. Our mind, though, is very limited and cannot follow all these processes with a vivid and detailed imagination of the many becomings the work went through till it was dried and fixed to the floor. Our perception tends to produce an isolated consciousness of processes and reduce change to a stable form or state. We assume the important element of this work is salt – and glue – but it may be water that is crucial, although is now absent. The relationship between what is there – and the random form salt and glue adopted on the floor – and what is not there forms the myth in this work. The myth is always a story that reflects and revolves around the possibility of something missing to return. A disappearance – here simply water, one of the most fundamental elements of all that exists – can be imagined to return just in seeing the salt flakes on the floor.
And talking about the creation of mythical energies, near that piece, hanging from the wall is the work An Ordinary Day, made in stainless steel wire. Steel wire carefully hand-produced poses a difficulty to vision. It is visible but its faint color and material against the whiteness of the exhibition space and the air pose difficulties for our eyes to fully grasp the details of the piece. Like the salt on the floor, its form seems eager to escape our efforts to fully retain it in our minds. Steel wire is solid, its form will not so easily change, like salt. But An Ordinary Day leaves us under the impression that every single thread has been separated from the steel plate in a very laborious way, turning the original plate into hair, breaking the continuous metal surface into single fibers as if they were combed and ready for a future spinning. A material suddenly reminds us of something else, as if metal could forget itself and become wool … Forming presence is forming absence. This way we expand our imagination of the work because we see more than what is there. Also, memory stops being a passive function that recalls a past or a fact. Memory actively reconstructs the state of the piece before the piece took its actual form, a stain of salt, a bundle of wire. The game between the work and non-work makes us realize that the non-piece comes into being through disappearance.

Organs

Carl Sagan said, “The brain is like a muscle.”⁶ If we accept that premise, we would need to find a bone to give that muscle support. Chung Seoyoung has built that bone through her very recent work, A Bone in the Brain (2022). First, it was an ensemble of thin wood, nothing very solid, nothing very permanent. A form that reminds one a little of a tree, or a plant. Then, that wood structure was transferred into bronze, gaining a different strength. It brings to mind a ballet barre, at first sight. Thinking about it, this image goes well with the title, A Bone in the Brain. The barre was invented to support dancers performing a series of protocol movements to discipline their bodies and posture. It is known as the instrument that trains inexperienced dancers in the art of balance. However, this barre, this thin, almost improvised, tree-like trunk needs assistance itself since five branch-like arms have grown out of it. The bodily expansion may have been an ambitious move, as it puts the entire work’s balance at risk. And, indeed, the five branches are attached to wires that connect to the ceiling to avoid the piece from losing its stability and falling. Some extra wire is hanging at one end of the sculpture, as if more wire assistance may be required in the near future. On one hand, the golden patina of the piece somehow surprises us. The gold undertones a sense of lightness, and also, warmth. As if the whole trial – pursuing to give the brain a bone – was something that could be realized with very simple means. But the golden color adds a symbolic resonance: it refers to the material we know, wood, but now that it is transferred in bronze with a golden patina it transcends its original precarity and emanates durability. The piece has been self-accomplished in finding this form after a long search.
Stand in the Middle, Lie Down in the Middle, Open the Middle, Go Out, and Never Come Back (2022) is a piece of vegan leather folded on the floor. Like the bone for the brain, here we are reminded of the skin. A skin made of inorganic material, the same manner in which intelligence can be made of artificial matter. As a form, it is neither organic nor mechanical. It is simple, and yet, very difficult to formally describe. Words do not stay easily with this one. This way, the work effectively delivers a forceful blow to the minimal aesthetics. It resembles an accident or the remains of an action, which ended up leaving behind this material as a trace. All through her work, Chung Seoyoung has shown an incredible understanding of the life of materials. Industry develops and uses materials that we then consume. Then, when these materials are used in art, they are subject to a complex and paradoxical judgment. They express the industrial reality they originate in, but due to this, they may be perceived as in-noble. Chung’s epistemology of matter finds a place and role for all the materials she encounters. Art gains in her practice the role of being compassionate with materials otherwise excluded from a traditional understanding of sculpture. The culturally formed materials are given a second life when she unforms their cultural identity to create a work. To put it another way, the industry puts materials at work, giving them a role, an aim, a function. And Chung puts the materials to sleep. Like this piece – Stand in the Middle, Lie Down in the Middle, Open the Middle, Go Out, and Never Come Back – she allows it to just stand, lie, open the center of the space for us, and disappear.
In such a way, her new works seem to contrast human intellectuality against disappearance. It is as if the “weightiness” of earlier works that are very present in the exhibition is now entering a new phase. Through the interaction between the condensed display of What I Saw Today and its fluid spatial layout, we understand even better this transition towards lightness and ease that liquidate the more restrictive mechanisms of the conscious present in the earlier works. Indeed, trying to control the real, and the materials that conform to it or the determinative behaviors of certain practices, is not the aim of Chung’s work. But certainly, the work wants us to gain a sensibility to observe and be aware of the processes that nourish our everyday lives, and eventually – with training and time – achieve an almost unconscious ability, which could allow us to co-exist with all that surrounds us.
What I Saw Today is therefore not a retrospective of Chung Seoyoung’s practice. It is an incredible opportunity to actualize all the exhibited works at once and create a present moment – an eternal today – for all the works and us. This today needs to be taken very seriously as it cannot be swallowed by a “past,” any nostalgic impulse to think of the decades behind or an escapist mood that sends the pieces into a near future. We need to stay in the present. Facing the work this way, it transmits an understanding of the multiple times they contain, and further gains a transcendent energy. Within this community of works in the exhibition, we learn to distinguish between observable and unobservable phenomena, as well as acquire an epistemic bearing of observational evidence both in life and art. At once, these two realms become intertwined. And so, through her work, we become more capable of interpreting the world around us.

Chus Martínez is currently the head of the Institute Art Gender Nature at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, where she also runs the lnstitute’s exhibition space Der Tank. Previously Martínez was the Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and MACBA, Barcelona, and Head of Department at dOCUMENTA (13). Recent publications are Like This. Natural Intelligence As Seen by Art (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2022); The Wild Book of Inventions (Sternberg Press, 2020), Corona Tales. Let Life Happen to You (Lenz, 2021).