CHUNG SANG GON

Radiant Yet Ephemeral By Park Young-taek (Professor at Kyunggi University, Art Critic) ________________________________________ “I honestly paint what is interesting in all the possible things I can paint.” (Jonas Wood) ________________________________________ 1.The artist Chung Sang-gon painted landscapes encountered during his walks on Daejisan Mountain, which is located near his studio. As his gaze penetrates directly into the interior of the mountain, the partially constrained woods and thickets, along with the ground, surge toward his vision in a dizzying array. The landscape sways, and the canvas vibrates amidst the rapid, impassioned brushstrokes and the aggregated mass of neutralized colors. These are the movements that trace the natural forms and rhythm of the indiscriminately gathered branches and grasses. He translates the immediacy of a specific location into the improvisation of the painting. I consider him an artist who rejects pre-determined meaning and interpretation and paints instead from the realm of materiality and direct experience. He seems to have had a compelling encounter—something that shook him—in the nature or lives he met along his walking path. Such an experience speaks of a 'poetic moment' where language and words cease, where they are rendered impotent. He attempts to render a newly possible, fresh landscape painting—one that overcomes the genre's inherent clichés—by capturing: something that strikes the human spirit; the dazzling experience and impression that transcends all conventional laws of nature; nature as an incomprehensible and opaque world, not a purely self-evident one; and, simultaneously, reflections on a landscape read through an anthropized gaze. These attempts appear to be a search for a way to capture the material exchange or reaction (which cannot be translated to concepts or language) or the world of reality and objects (which can be sensed by the body), and also a process of exploring a trajectory that is fundamentally different from existing interpretations of landscape. The artist prioritizes the realization of ambiguous sensations or sensibilities over concrete concepts. Nature is not captured by a priori knowledge or information. His painting becomes the realization of the sensation felt through one's own body and flesh when confronting that inscrutable landscape. This is not the mere representation of an object, but an act of expressing the appearance of things as perceived in space, and of scooping out the ceaselessly fluxing space that was experienced through the act of painting. 2.The artist does not view nature from a purely contemplative standpoint. His gaze perceives nature as a living entity. Because of his close engagement with the subject, viewers strongly feel the presence of these elements before their eyes. The paintings contain trees and grass, but they are truly aimed at the light and color of the four seasons. His canvas is not merely occupied by specific objects; simultaneously, numerous traces of the act of painting these objects heavily emerge. The background, paint layers, brushstroke remnants, and a variety of intersecting lines are breathtakingly displayed. The wriggling brushstrokes and sharp lines traverse the surface in disarray, creating the illusion of movement. This is akin to the concept of the 'stroke' (hoek), a trace carrying the artist's sensation or sensibility. Every mark contains the memory of a particular movement. Thus, these marks are the traces of what he saw, the vestiges of an attempt to capture the impression and emotion triggered by the object and the physical gestures or brushwork of an endeavor to accurately render what was seen and felt. In his paintings, which record the rhythm imbued by nature with sharp and incisive brushstrokes, I am freshly reminded of the force of the brush (pill-yeok) and the power/momentum (se) encountered in Oriental paintings. All his acts of painting with the brush ultimately target the vibrant stroke, the one that draws out the essence of the subject. Above all, the sharp, keen lines of the tree trunks dance and extend, illustrating a vibrant and dynamic portrayal. Moreover, he attempts to express everything with a limited palette. In this work, which seeks another dimension of expression within the intentionally set constraints of color, what is important to him is not the color itself but prompting a reflection on the meaning that the color conveys. While his paintings contain concrete objects, these objects are reduced to and scattered as materials. Simultaneously, the coalesced matter shows traces that still evoke the external world. This landscape, a blend of figuration and abstraction, of images and materials, converges into a narrow space. It simultaneously evokes the two-dimensional plane while dynamically and generatively activating it. 3.Chung Sang-gon’s landscape soberly depicts only trees and grass; these are fragments of a scenery excised from the world. The landscape is extracted from a specific location on Daejisan Mountain, representing something that left a powerful impression on the artist. However, what the artist painted and represented is not the mere exterior of a specific object, but everything within the artist himself that was triggered by it. The external world surrounding us approaches as the other ones, unknown and unfamiliar. The object, nature, is what cannot be named or fully known. Nature cannot be wholly represented. The beauty of nature is also an extremely mysterious domain. Consequently, artists who imitate nature and are captivated by its beauty despair at the varied forms and countless colors that nature holds in gestation. Painting exists between that despair and the challenge. Chung Sang-gon’s painting also trembles along this line. This painting is only possible through the internalization of the landscape's spirit and soul—a drawing that stems from the artist's direct incorporation of the confronted landscape. The long, slender branches, leaves, and grasses sway. The world cannot be fixed; it is in a state of becoming and in motion. Amidst the changes in climate, temperature, wind, and atmosphere, and within the intense flow of time, nature fiercely changes moment by moment. The artist seeks to paint the living state of the tree, the dynamic force of its power, and the time in the process of formation. The form of nature is a dynamic state. Hence, he states, "This is a process of genesis and also of dissipation. Therefore, morphology is the theory of transformation." A world that is constantly shifting cannot be completely solidified on a fixed picture plane. The artist traces its flow, movement and energy, and reveals it anew. Chung Sang-gon's landscape painting is an arduous attempt to capture and give form to the minute vital energy, breath, texture, and delicate wrinkles of nature and living things. This animistic experience, which perceives an impersonal character in objects or nature, corresponds to Henri Bergson's 'mechanism of the intellect that seeks not to reduce this world to nothingness.' Animistic perception is precisely the projection of the self onto inorganic matter. The artist notes in his studio journal: "The grasses that emerge from unusually red or black soil, and the nature scattered among them, constantly transform yet remain eternally immutable. This contradictory nature provides vital logic for human life. Thus, our flesh and blood seep into the crevices between the stones, becoming dust. It is where our lives and souls are imbued." This attribution of meaning leads to a new reading of his landscapes. It makes us ponder that certain something that is not visibly manifest but is imbued in the soil, the grass, and the trees. In essence, he is seeking a point where the historical events of this land—both concrete and abstract—might manifest as a symptom of the landscape. It is the reading of nature as an embodied existence and the painting of a landscape body that has been permeated by a humanistic gaze. ________________________________________ 4.Nature constantly transforms yet remains eternally immutable. This contradiction inherent in nature provides a crucial logic for human life. People observe, learn from, and achieve realization through nature. The meanness and squalor of a finite human life are healed in the presence of nature. Nature continuously transcends itself through constant change, dispersing countless life forms. In motion, it restlessly shifts from one form to another. By ceaselessly moving, it creates, destroys, and dissipates existing forms, only to generate new ones. Through this vital activity of nature, humans reflect upon their own life. They secretly mirror their own finite existence against nature's boundless realm. Therefore, observing nature and living things is not about confirming the position of humanity as the absolute subject, but about participating in the 'Otherness of Infinity.' Following such a journey is precisely what Chung Sang-gon’s painting embodies. Perhaps this is why his paintings stand with tremendous power yet simultaneously evoke an atmosphere of solitude and melancholy. This is nothing other than a certain sentiment of compassion toward the landscape, namely a complex emotion of dissipation, disappearance, and contingency—and perhaps an elegy dedicated to all living things. As the artist himself puts it, how "radiant and yet ephemeral" nature is. (Artist's Note) This critique was written to commemorate Chung Sang-gon's solo exhibition “Radiant Yet Ephemeral” at the Woonjoong Gallery in October 2025.