HEEMIN CHUNG

Portrait courtesy of the artist.

Heemin Chung investigates the material potential of digital images by translating them into the mediums of painting and sculpture. Her work examines how technology shapes contemporary perception and impacts our existential conditions, capturing various emotional responses and issues of communication encountered in the urban environments that evolve alongside the progress of technology. Through poetic visual metaphor, she reimagines traditional painting genres, including landscape and still life, engaging with experimental techniques to explore texture and volume across digital devices and canvas. Born in Korea, Heemin Chung lives and works in Seoul. 

Notable past solo and group exhibitions include: UMBRA, Thaddaeus Ropac, London, England (2024); Receivers, Doosan Art Center, Seoul, South Korea (2023);  Speaking about the Future: Shape, Map, Tree, Prologue of Changwon Sculpture Biennale, Changwon, South Korea (2023);  Streaming Time, Breguet X Frieze, Seoul, South Korea (2023); How Do We Get Lost in the Forest, P21, Seoul, South Korea (2022); We, On the Rising Wave, Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea (2022); to name a few. 

LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: How do you see the role of painting - what does it mean to you and how do you experience it through your work? 

HEEMIN CHUNG: Painting manifests unseen sensations, and I believe it gains a role when engaged with reality. It functions not just as imagery but as a symbolic language, like poetry, shaped by context and symbolic acts rather than mere visuals. Understanding a painting requires attention, time, and effort.

Though material or imagery may seem to distance the painter from reality, symbolic logic transforms this distance into articulation. Growing up surrounded by paintings, I felt both influenced and comforted by them. This personal connection continues to provide reassurance.

In my earlier works, I explored the world through medium specificity, embracing digital tools to engage with conventional painting themes. I depicted landscapes and objects that shaped my experiences, contextualizing them within the painting’s history. However, the global pandemic raised questions about how to engage with changing realities.

These unresolved questions shifted my focus toward a more physical process of becoming. Recently, my work has evolved into responding to processes rather than explaining phenomena. The outcomes now emerge unpredictably, shaped organically by the act of painting itself.

A Portrait of a Drenched Dog, 2019, oil, acrylic, and gel medium on canvas, 182 x 182 cm_ Photo by Chunho Ahn, Courtesy of P21

LŠ: Your work takes on different digital images that are through the separation of pigment and the act of depiction taking on a new body thus playing with the notion of perception. Exactly what role does illusion play in your exploration of perception?

HC: I seek to depict states that transcend the physical world, oscillating between psychedelic visions and intangible impressions. These sensations reflect the physical experiences of a media-saturated environment. Illusion occupies physical space, bridging distances between people and acting as a surrogate for bodily autonomy. Its omnipresence makes it invisible, amplifying its power. This absence of visual reduction creates a poetic space where I find meaning.

In my practice, data constitutes reality. By translating objects of information into materialized forms using techniques like transferring and casting, I aim to open imaginative and layered spaces of reproduction and proliferation. In my recent paintings, diverse elements—flowers, fields, animal rib cages, tree bark, and bird feathers—fragment into images before synthesizing into cohesive forms. This uncanny fusion between  I and Non-I does not settle into easily recognizable objects or scenes but instead conveys a more abstract cohesion. These forms act as unified, seamless entities that condense layers of time into a singular presence. I aim to explore the trance-like states and heightened physical responses experienced by users immersed in the endless flow of transmitted time.

The Opening of the Night, 2023, oil, acrylic, and inkjet transferred gel medium, 227 x 181 cm_Photo by Jangwhal Lim, Courtesy of Doosan Art Center

LŠ: Your work explores new dimensions of the painting format and what might perhaps surprise the viewers is that it incorporates different digital methods, such as inkjet printing and 3D modeling. How has your painting process evolved over time and how has the addition of different technologies reshaped the way you view paintings? 

HC: My work has evolved in a way that reflects the progression of digital devices. The way various digital tools process layers has influenced how I use the gel medium as a material. This has influenced my use of gel mediums, shifting from flat sheets to incorporating cast mediums for volume. Unlike my earlier works that emphasized the relationships between individual images, I now compose sketches as a synthesis of multiple layers and render them on a single surface in a seamless, unified manner.

Illusion, I feel, can no longer be shaped; it can only be transmitted. This is why I have adopted methods of transferring and printing. I first model forms on the surface and then proceed to color them by printing or transferring pigments onto the surface. Texture and color remain separated, a key reflection of how I deal with illusions—an existential state that does not unify with the body.

The traces of mechanical media devices have already replaced painterly marks in the works of many artists, from Rauschenberg to Guyton, and discovering such traces is no longer surprising. When the plane transcends its state as an image to reconstruct the virtual we encounter and question its nature, I believe it can acquire a mediatic meaning that reveals the sensibilities of our time within a historical context.

LŠ: As the current technologies evolve and new ones emerge - how do you see it affecting your practice? What new connections are you interested in exploring? 

HC: Considering the climatic reality we are confronted with, I believe that sophisticated data processing technologies, including AI, have already reached a point of diminishing returns. As these technologies emerge, they fill every gap in our time and perception. However, rather than making our understanding more complete, this saturation fragments it. My work begins from the reality of a digitized, virtual environment, one in which subjectivity is inevitably synchronized. 

Yet, I am more interested in exploring the conditions of being human that remain possible even after accepting these circumstances, rather than pursuing novelty for its own sake. This inquiry is closely tied to the search for a sense of space where we might reside. It also serves as the foundation for the intense conflict between a body that refuses compromise and a mind striving for survival.

LŠ: Importantly your work looks at understanding objects and our immediate surroundings. We spoke of this sense of living and interacting with environments yet concurrently feeling detached. We find ourselves in the interesting position of being equally present and yet seeking counternoise. I would love to hear your reflections on technology’s impact on existential conditions and our responses to urban life. 

HC:  I live in Seoul, a city that is complex and acutely sensitive to change. Reflecting on the Seoul of my childhood until today, the city feels almost unrecognizable due to rapid modernization. Where every facet of the city—including its absorption of technology, shifting ethical standards, and the dynamic forces of capital—has profoundly influenced my life.

Replication technologies fundamentally changed our sense of time and space by encoding places into symbolic forms. Under the demands of efficiency and convenience, not only time and space but also sensory experiences such as taste, sound, and touch are increasingly being conceptualized.

The relationship between technology, urbanity, and human desire defies causal arrangement. In an urban environment governed by the logic of infinity, the speed and superficiality it generates often lead to the displacement of the body—either through detachment or through excessive entanglement. 

The suppression of physical desires or the isolation experienced in these dynamics further reinforces this logic. Artificial lighting, relentless labor that deprives us of sleep and rest, a system that perpetually distorts our perception of time, the promise of eternal bodies and minds, extended lives, and the inverted relationship between the reproduced world and the material one—in all these create conditions of life in which our finite bodies endure profound fatigue, emotional desolation, and pervasive indifference, I feel that nothing is more political than speaking about individual loneliness.

LŠ: In Flower series you addressed processes that can be adapted to counter the speed of current times. We also already spoke of meditating as a healing process. How do you balance and see the concepts of rituals and spiritual balance within technological landscapes? 

HC: Self-exploration in painting, for me, is a process of seeking a way to step outside of myself. How that is possible, I am still unsure. However, I strive to view the conditions of the machine-body relationship from a slightly different perspective—not as something empty, but as something capable of holding and containing.

As I mentioned earlier, I attempt various forms of “becoming” through painting. By synthesizing with what is not me, I dissolve into the space between different existences. I aim to discover the maximum potential for chance through the mediation of objects, temporarily becoming one with them while refusing to settle on any single entity. My goal is to unfold a time-space liberated from causality.

This approach has led me to forget the starting point of a painting and rendered the outcome completely unpredictable. It is a process of receiving every incoming signal—converting and expanding it into another form of sensation —that is constantly in flux and full. That is how I offset the current pressures by visiting another layer of the world.

LŠ: In our previous conversation you spoke of the desire to mark new territories. Ones that you observe, learn of, and then adapt. How does your exploration of digitized objects and spaces reflect on the notions of rebirth, memory, and decline in urban environments? 

HC: Each day, we are incrementally absorbed into the world of pixels and numbers, confronting a symbolic death. The technologies and cities I experience operate under the same agreed-upon values, reorganizing the fabric of physical life. Of course, death is never truly an end—it is merely another name for creation. I constantly imagine ways to transform this state of stasis into other possibilities.

In my recent exhibition, UMBRA, I sought to stage situations that confront the finite conditional limits of death through stories transmitted via memory. In Seoul, every day, parts of the city disappear and are reborn, shedding and renewing itself relentlessly. Yet within this cycle, there are aging bodies, fragmented routines, and remnants of the every day that persist in holding the city together. 

I restored fragments of the body– preserving the way they were remembered through the act of photogrammetry performed by others - onto the stage of Dasilraegi, a traditional funeral play. They simultaneously embody a sensory world accessible only to shaman-like humans, manifesting the scent of decay, dampness, the cries of animals, and the vibrations created by hybrid forms of human and non-human entities. They navigate a world where one can be reborn countless times, using a flexible body to transform into new forms of existence. 

Installation View of UMBRA, 2024_ Courtesy of Thaddeus Ropac gallery, London • Paris • Salzburg • Seoul © Heemin Chung Photo by Eva Herzog

Installation View of UMBRA, 2024_ Courtesy of Thaddeus Ropac gallery, London • Paris • Salzburg • Seoul © Heemin Chung Photo by Eva Herzog

Installation View of UMBRA, 2024_ Courtesy of Thaddeus Ropac gallery, London • Paris • Salzburg • Seoul © Heemin Chung Photo by Eva Herzog

Ignorant Silence_2024_ gel medium, resin, stainless steel, copper pipe, wood stick, 130(h) x 32 x 42 cm_Courtesy of Thaddeus Ropac gallery, London • Paris • Salzburg • Seoul © Heemin Chung Photo by Eva Herzog

New territories are lands that already exist but remain undiscovered. They may be spaces of death or, conversely, places where things seeking revival reach out for a body to inhabit.

LŠ: You also mentioned that you are interested in exploring connections between the artificial and natural world. How has your research started and evolved? 

HC: I do not see the artificial and natural worlds as separate entities. What we experience as “nature” is merely nature within the artificial world—a construct that is comprehensible and nameable by human notions. Anything beyond these notions lies outside our understanding. 

The nature I invoke is nature as a part of the city, various bodies within the city, or an area that exists somewhere between what we can or cannot name.  I first began painting that traverses natural subjects during my time working at the Seoul Museum of Art Nanji Residency. 

Nanji is a place where the remnants of Seoul’s rapid industrialization in the 1990s were buried to form two hills, later transformed into a massive ecological park. Surrounding this area is a sprawling media industry complex. Wandering through this eerie, artificial forest, where a decaying, massive body and the thriving nature that cloaks it coexist in parallel time, I often contemplated the virtual sensations offered by the city. It felt like a potent metaphor for how surfaces become detached from their functions and begin to lead lives of their own. At night, I roamed the park, encountering the ghosts of dead fish, collapsed department stores, and submerged homes. Come morning, I would paint the memories of the night. 

LŠ: Your educational background was also in sculpture - how has your sculptural work translated into your painting practice? Do you even see the borders between the disciplines? 

HC: During my undergraduate studies, I double majored in painting and sculpture. I approach the sculptures I create as extensions of the pictorial surface, shaping them with this perspective in mind. In the context of my practice, I consider them the most progressive form of a surface - not solid masses but rather composites of thin shells. Recently, I have found 3D models generated through photogrammetry to craft my sculptures. Since these models originate from flat images or data, I see no fundamental difference in approach between painting and sculpture. However, with sculpture, the added necessity of enduring gravity introduces methodological differences, which in turn influence and inform both practices.

As I mentioned earlier, my recent paintings incorporate cast mediums to build volume—a development that emerged from sculptural experimentation. Without having explored these ideas through sculpture, such methodological evolution might not have been possible. 

In a Carcass Cooled Just Right for New Growth_2024_ UV printed gel medium, aluminum, 80 x 80 x 80 cm_Courtesy of Thaddeus Ropac gallery, London • Paris • Salzburg • Seoul © Heemin Chung Photo by Eva Herzog

How Scorching You Are to Hold Onto_2024_ aluminum, inkjet transferred gel medium, resin, cotton rope, 160 x 80 x 69 cm_Courtesy of Thaddeus Ropac gallery, London • Paris • Salzburg • Seoul © Heemin Chung Photo by Eva Herzog

LŠ: And the fabric-like elements we encounter in your recent work? 

HC: What you describe as “fabric” is, more precisely, chunks of paint that mimic the movement of fabric. I have previously shared with you that my Serpentine Twerk series was inspired by the folds of Judith’s skirt as described in Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.

In his book, Huxley writes: “In that world’s biggest drugstore, looking closely at Judith’s skirt, I realized that Botticelli had gazed at fabric in the same way that my eyes had been transformed and transformative that morning.” He goes on to say, “They saw is-ness—the ultimate identity of God, the essence, the sheer existence, the very self of folded cloth—and did their best to express it in paint or stone… Simply looking at a flower, a book, a chair, a piece of flannel and becoming that sacred Not-I, that alone would suffice.”

The time spent following the flowing, liquid state of fabric mirrors the time of waiting for the misalignment of the world as I perceive it through my skin opens into infinite ambiguity within small objects. In this waiting, the folds transform endlessly—one day they are flowers, then the sea, then a bird’s wing, then a woman’s heart. A beast’s rib cage becomes a wound, then an empty field. In my studio, this time of waiting continues as the folds evolve into the unknown.