Roaming Hours and Memories

-Exhibition of Cheong, Jinyun

by Lee, Dongsuk (Art critic)

Cheong, Jinyun is an artist who has stared at reality based on historical conception. Up until the early and middle 90s he has persistently questioned the human conditions diffracted in history and damaged in the backside of daily life through a series of works named <Shadow of history>. Critical allegories created by the artist through indiscriminating contrast of fragmented images borrowed from history and reality and collision of idiosyncratic signs were for the withering purity under the shade of power-hungry greed as protests and jeers against individual situations whose roots were disintegrated by the collective value system and the logics of power.

However, in his recent works the sarcastic jeers and the negativity mixed nihilism disclosed through assemblies of decomposed images and associative narratives are not visible up front. Instead, the thickness of accumulated hours is hidden into mythical shapes, and the signal illustrations in contrast with the heavily overlapped background are relatively creating a cold intension. Although the artist’s archaeological interests in history are still maintained, as the conception on historical circumstances are internalized in recent works, serene retrospection on the source of loss and the doubleness of life is now intensified whereas the desperate and tragic implications shown in earlier works have disappeared.

Wings fixed into the background of overlapped beheaded Buddha statues, bleak scenes of excavation, golden hexagon pollars aimlessly fldating on eroded copper plates, decolored images and cool geometric order, and the metallic contract in stubborn binding with mythical images are unfamiliar and nonsymmetric but barely hold up the balance of power in intension.

Illustrations carelessly wearing out amid the history as deep as an abyss or images incidentally solidified, and the memories floating up while being buried in the back of daily life and illuminating bright even in the thickness of accumulated hours… Although his paintings had interpreted the usual tragedy of life with his archaeological interests which are transcendent of time and space, the way he speculates the world has always been through something of rather distorted comparisons and inferences instead of direct description of the world. His paintings are the results form the artist’s retrospection on the reality of disgrace and absurdity, but underlying in them is his tragic conception in defiance of any comforts whatsoever.

That is, between the lightness and heaviness of life, ambiguity and clarity of world, sublimity and transiency of history, and the infinity of time and constrained ego lies an ever irreducible ambiguity. In the age when we talk about the death of art, we have but to hope that his journey with desperate affection for painting finds a free narrow alley passing in between the doubleness of history and the ambiguity of world, overcoming the nihilism and sarcasm.

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