Chung Kwang-Hwa — Tiens ! J’ai retrouvé ma voiture — Maria Lund Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 25 → December 1, 2012

Modeling of the memory…

With the simplest means, a large crate filled with plaster powder animated by a steam machine and an incandescent light, Chung Kwang-Hwa describes the memory processes: In the mass of the plaster are formed valleys and mountains, lakes and constantly evolving deserts, upon which float foggy vapours. That is how the functioning of our memories models, where the time and the life impulses provoke an incessant construction and deconstruction of the landscapes of our memories.

Look ! I’ve found my car again !

The idea of constant loss of the recollection of events, of unconscious modification of the veracity of remembrance haunts Chung Kwang-Hwa’s works. In his installations wander casts of small cars; old cars that bring us back to forgotten times and to childhood poetry. They are like memories; sometimes in a perfect state, mostly slightly altered by time, half sunken in plaster, not quite what they used to be, almost erased… They are often models of the same cars, but their size and appearance vary, like when a same object alters its character, like when an event becomes more or less important as time goes by, that is the emotional value we confer to it.
The evolutions of the artist’s « memory crates » are made in the shelter of the mists that envelop them ; we can never see the entirety of the landscape — just as we can never remember everything at the same time. The inaccessibility of memories that are buried in us the deepest is illustrated in the artist’s installations with the imposing black structures that contain the landscape, only showing parts of it. In front of another of his works, it is impossible for the spectator to go around the installation — too immense — stuck between three walls. And we cannot see the background, far away, veiled…
But a breath on the vapours, a sudden move from the mists, and a patch of the landscape reveals itself like a reminiscence…

Look! I found my car again. Find again : find a part of one’s self again, that old me that resurrects in front of an object intimately linked to childhood; to recall, or physically find again.

With his installations, Chung Kwang-Ha evokes the mysteries of memory processes and forgetfulness, the permanent and uncontrollable flows of life and memory…
Through a parallel work of photography the artist tries to capture the instant, so that the image itself generates a recollection. Thus, a movement of the evolution of the “memory crate” is caught by the photography medium: Some “memory-cars” break free from the fog, appear in full light, while others, still plunged in the obscurity, take shape in the haziness. A memory that calls upon another… A few seconds later, this car that we barely still see could have been the subject of a completely different scene. *That is the aim of Chung Kwang-Ha’s works: to show what escapes us, to seize the elusive, the train of thought, or a memory on the verge of fainting.

After having received a diploma from the Chugye Art University, engraving speciality in 2001, Chung Kwang-Hwa (born in Seoul in South Korea in 1974), moved to Paris to follow a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at the Paris 1 University Pantheon-Sorbonne, which he completed in 2007. In 2009, he won the Paris Jisung for young artists competition, which prize was an exhibition and a catalogue. He has been part since 2005 of numerous collective shows in Europe and South Korea, as well as the Art Karlsruhe and Cologne fair in 2012.

Look! I’ve found my car again, selected by the Mois de la photo Off 2012, is his first solo show in France.