Mit der Arbeit Wasserfall betritt Kwanyoung Jung eine neue Phase seines Schaffens. Wo zuvor der utopische Raum das zentrale Element war, beginnt Jung nun diesen Raum zu erkunden. Die Linien, mit welchen er seine Raumbilder aufbaute, werden befreit um eine eigene Form zu finden. «Ich habe immer Räume geschaffen und diese durch lineare Strukturierung untersucht und geformt. Nun steht die Frage im Zentrum, was befindet sich in diesen Räumen – vielleicht ein Wasserfall?» Die strengen Linienbilder werden durch die gewählte Technik auch in ihrer Dynamik aufgebrochen. Durch das Auftragen, Einwirken und wieder Auswaschen von Gouache auf Steinpapier entsteht diese einzigartige Farbgebung, die den Wasserfall so lebendig und wandelbar erscheinen lässt. Jung sieht seine abstrakte Formsprache als Möglichkeit, Platz zu schaffen für eine eigene Welt, in der eigene Regeln aufgestellt werden können. Diese eigenen Welten erforscht er konsequent und akribisch, wobei ihm das Unerwartete und Überraschende auch als zentrales Werkzeug dient.
Text: Klarissa Flückiger, Kunsthaus Baselland 2018
Headlong Flow of Lines
Kwanyoung Jung’s pictures are a silent and forceful means of penetrating and knowing the world.
Kwanyoung Jung, a friendly, cheerful researcher of the unknown who comes from South Korea and lives in Berlin, is animated by the urge to communicate and by absolute determination. He belongs entirely to himself. He is a specialist of the line. He most likes to work on primed canvas, sometimes on paper. He uses 2-4 mm broad brushes, Korean ink, and acrylic paints.
Kwanyoung Jung’s decelerated gaze finds its place within hurtling modernity in his own labyrinths of lines, which tell how life can look in the expectation of intrusion into its structures. Stringently and as if it could be no other way, they penetrate the strata of time, softly elapsing, floral, in complex order and the greatest possible simplicity. Despite all the abstraction of the results, Kwanyoung Jung follows a representational way of thinking. The titles of his works also bear witness to this; they carry on a dialog with what is real as what is seen. The only question is where the artist is at a particular moment – in the micro- or the macro-perspective.
Kwanyoung Jung, who studied in Halle, paints and draws details of the world, thereby creating moods. Nuances of hue, responsible for what is idyllic and anti-idyllic and tied to the earth, reeds, or stone, stimulate the tightrope walk between accessibility and inaccessibility. In any case, they dismember the coziness in which the German bourgeoisie has set up house in the period after the fall of Communism.
When Kwanyoung Jung works on his pictures, it is a strict, quiet, monological procedure. The artist turns to himself. A quite tone of communicativeness does not begin to sound until these pictures are brought among people, but also only if someone indeed desires entry to these labyrinths. Sometimes one has the impression that Kwanyoung Jung is the visionary monk by the sea, that enigmatic man in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting (1810) who stands in a salient position on a deserted beach. He turns his back to us and looks out into the depths of the universe. If he were to see something we don’t see, he would communicate it to us only in a whisper.
Christoph Tannert
(Art Director of Künstlerhaus Bethanien) 2009