The Introduction and Distribution of Fabric Arts

According to professor Il Lee, "The introduction of Professor Kyoung Yeon Chung, without a doubt was one of the noblest events. In other words, it gaves Korean fabric art a higher status and changed the usual order entirely."


Back in the 1980s, this art existing in a land of silent mornings, was a hybrid between the slowly disappearing concrete art and the well-known romantic abstracts done in similar colors. Not only that but the tapestry was also limited to a wall. Professor Chung became one of the pioneers in Korea by getting rid of these traditional factors and using an anatomical and structural approach to fabric art with gloves.


"It was not my intention to be known as a glove artist. I chose the medium of gloves because I am infatuated with their natural and the humorous characters and I also believe that there is no other medium used that can be more meaningful than the gloves." says Chung An ordinary object used everyday by a human can be absorbed into an artist's world and created as a novelty.


Looking at Chung's development, the originality of her unusual artistic expression contains within it, its mortal sensitivity kept in a heart with its distinct strength. Her original and collective work stems form a very simple medium. For example, a glove is not defined by its own existence, but it contains a different idea generated from the processes of being arranged in order as a group, not just by a form by itself.


This familiar and also symbolic medium is a product of a modern mind that questions existence of humans, symbolizes the source of plant lives, and animalistic phenomenon.


The fabric art was introduced and distributed after progressing away from the ficed image of traditional tapestry and the decorative Baroque-style sculptures, Chung broke away from the limitations and created her own character derived from her own figure and language, along with the core of her field such as Abakanowicz, Grau Garriga, Jagoda Buic, and Olga de Amaral.


From her casting and her flowing but contrasted casting figures, the implied harmony of the tie-dye-like images formed around the lateral and vertical image of a spine-like column reminds her of a human body. Her work consists of two extremes of spotty color schemes or no color at all, texture that is strong and bumpy, or fractionized like a capillary that is not monotonous at all, and these are complete with fine stitching. Every point of intersection is tense with the density of cotton balls, natural with the mutual union, and sensitive with harmony, and the balance within this shows many visual changes as much as we are moved emotionally from it. Chung sorts shapes of gloves, then cuts, tightens, pulls, shortens, then lengthens, so she can dye the tips in black and white. These gloves are then either placed in a line, or they are stacked up on each other. Through these expanded and unfixed changes, a flowing curve is drawn.


The fiber model is uniquely formed with its sometimes thin and gentle streamline-shaped harmony and other times compressed and flat image of a block or a relief. It reveals immanent visual shock and matured emotions very well.


From another aspect, it passes over the invariability of objects and contains a figure of a column although it is done with bronze or clay. Chung expressed the physical rhythm of these objects with refinement. This also would be an unexpected idealistic expression with a poetic ambience.


We progress by cherishing territories of forms within lives full of forms that have surpassed the object pretext.


If Chung's Assemblages were to show us an inclination for another monument, they would base themselves on endless imaginations that regulate her world with her language.


In the year 1996

Gerard Xuriguera / Art Critic

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