© Beck & Eggeling

Kwang Young Chun is regarded as a contemporary master in his work with paper and enjoys worldwide recognition for his installations and three-dimensional reliefs. Chun meticulously creates striking surface structures by wrapping hundreds of hand-cut polystyrene triangles in inscribed Korean tissue paper, so-called »mulberry paper«, then arranging and fixing. The result is three-dimensional wall works with sculptural potential.

The tissue paper, which the artist takes from old books and magazines, retains its Korean character through the visible characters and is also often colored with natural dyes from fruits, flowers, earth, or tea. These astonishing creations melt together in waves of color and swell up and down before the viewer’s eyes, while their surface structures evoke aerial images of natural phenomena such as undulating flower fields, desert and crater landscapes, or scarred moon landscapes.

Sensitively and accurately modeled, Chun's works are the result of great care and extreme precision. The viewer has the opportunity to experience an inherent, self-contained balance and unmistakable tranquillity through Chun's work.

Reduced to the simplest of materials, the artist expresses aspects of human existence in his universal and contemporary pictorial language, while at the same time a specifically Korean sense of culture and tradition speaks through his work. This ability to communicate with an individual visual language while simultaneously reflecting on his South Korean origins is also characteristic of decisive moment in Chun's international career, which began in 1995 and was influenced by a childhood memory. The memory of his uncle, a practicing doctor, who hung his medical herbs, wrapped in tissue paper, closely together from the ceiling, led Chun to use this traditional tissue paper, found in every household, as artistic material for his work.

Kwang Young Chun was born in 1944 in Hongcheon, South Korea and did his B.F.A., Hong-Ik University, Korea, and Philadelphia College of Art, Philadelphia. He lives and works in Boondang-gu, South Korea. His works are represented in renowned public collections such as the Rockefeller Foundation, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington D.C.; United Nations in New York; National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul; Seoul Museum of Art; National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; and the Busan Metropolitan Art Museum.