. . . the best features of the new correspond to an old need, . . .
Paul Valéry 1
mais il faut cultivar notre jardin.
Voltaire 2
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.
Rudyard Kipling 3
We are delighted, in this third exhibition in the ongoing Faculty Projects series held each summer in the Studio Gallery at Brookhaven College, to present recent works by Chong Keun Chu. These works are at once are a summation and an extension of an ongoing body of work. Nearly monochromatic in distinction from Chu's intensely colored works of the early 1990's, 4 the paintings and drawings in this exhibition continue the use of many of the motifs referencing the garden of Chu's earlier works, while being distinguished by the particulars of their facture and of their presentational format.
The paintings in this exhibition are mostly comprised of modular units, each in itself an autonomous work, here conjoined into larger configurations of two to seven units. Each of the modular units is one foot square, 5 canvas on a stretcher sufficiently thick in proportion to the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the unit to give emphasis to the objectness of the works. The repeated, uniform size of the modular units and the predominant use of a predominantly umber brown ground and a creamy, somewhat ocher white for the linear figuration throughout the series of paintings gives a strong continuity to the body of work, while it also emphasizes the variation of motifs and form within each square canvas as permutations within a constant thematic structure. The square format as such is a perfected quaternity evoking wholeness, 6 and thus traditionally symbolic of deity 7 and of the wholeness of the individual. T8 he square format is also traditionally assimilated to the severing of sacred from profane space in the delimitation of the temenos, and the motif of the garden as trope of paradise; while this is inherent in any painting qua delimited field, it is especially strong in the case of a square format as analogue to a hortus conclusus. The square as a symbolic form for manifestations of wholeness, in its regularity and isotropy, and in its ostention of the center, emphasized by the intersection of its four axes of symmetry readily assumes reference to the temenos 9 as enclosure, and the cardinal directions as attributes of a garden paradise. 10 The square is a module within the Cartesian grid and is thus a figure for the mensurability of space, and thus of culture in distinction from nature, consonant with garden as site of cultivation. Excluding the dominance of either the vertical or the horizontal, the square is a figure of stasis and thus of timelessness in the terrestrial domain. 11 As a penetration of the atemporal into temporal, the motif entails a suggestion of immanent transcendence. In the discrete character of the modular units and the constellation of the separate units into larger composite units, the motif of the garden, or The Garden as Edenic paradise, is evoked in a dialectic of fragment and whole. Indeed, in their juxtaposition in installation, the several works recapitulate this dialectic within the temenos of the gallery space. The garden is a topos of rich resonance and extension, sometimes in perhaps unexpected domains, as Arthur Lovejoy has suggested:
Landscape-gardening, . . . , seems a topic fairly remote from philosophy; yet at one point, at least, the history of landscape-gardening becomes a part of any truly philosophical his- tory of modern thought.. . .
. . . Romanticism may not inaccurately be described as a conviction that the world is an englischer Garten on a grand scale. The God of the seventeenth century, like its gardeners, always geometrized; the God of Romanticism was one in whose universe things grew wild and without trimming and in all the rich diversity of their natural shapes. The preference for irregularity, the aversion from that which is wholly intellectualized, the yearning for échappées into misty distances - these, which were eventually to invade the intellectual life of Europe at all points, made their first modern appearance on a grand scale in the eighteenth century in the form of the new fashion in pleasure gardens; . . . 12
Chu reiterates this dialectic of the geometric and the biomorphic throughout these works, a trope recapitulating and sublating the dual paths of modernist abstraction. The motifs suggesting a derivation from plant forms, seeds, plowed furrows, also reference the tradition of antecedent abstraction, the linear forms resonant with works as diverse as Paul Klee's La belle jardinaire), and Barnett Newman's zips. 13 If to do this seems eclectic, at this moment in the situation of painting, it is perhaps inevitable if postmodernism entails, as Jean-Françoise Lyotard has suggested, a situation in which:
A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end, but in the nascent state, and this state is constant. 14
The motif of the garden has at once manifestations both as macrocosm and as microcosm. In both of these aspects, the garden motif is a recurrent nascent condition, and thus a return ab origine, as Mircea Eliade notes. 15 As such, it engages the macrocosm of cosmogonic myth:
Every mythical account of the origin of anything presupposes and continues the cosmog- ony. From the structural point of view, origin myths can be homologized with the cosmogonic myth.16 Likewise, Jung notes the assimilation of the garden motif to the microcosm of the self. 17 As with the analogous mandala form, 18 the garden as a symbolic form entails an analogy to the self as:
the premonition of a centre of personality, a kind of central point within the psyche, to which everything is related, by which everything is arranged, and which is itself a source of energy. . . . Although the centre is represented by an innermost point, it is surrounded by a periphery containing everything that belongs to the self-the paired opposites that make up the total personality. . . The self, though on the one hand simple, is on the other hand an extremely composite thing, . . . 19This composite character of the self is given its formal expression in the conjoining of the several modular squares into a single artwork: a correlative of constellated aspects of the self, and a correlative of the garden as fragmented trope of lost paradise. Within each of the squares, the fundamental operations of différance 20 are articulated as the paired oppositions of figure and ground, of light and dark, of line and shape. The proximate efficient cause of these opposed pairs is the écriture and touche 21 of the artist's hand. The emphasis given the paintness of the paint in the highly textured and worked surface of these paintings, the trace of the hand, is the manifestation of the centrality to the modernist project of thehandmadeness of the artwork qua object. This is a trope thematized particularly in high modernism, as Yve-Alain Bois notes:
Challenged by the mechanical apparatus of photography, and by the mass-produced, painting had to redefine its status, to reclaim a specific domain (much in the way this was done during the Renaissance, when painting was posited as one of the "liberal arts" as opposed to the "mechanical arts"). The beginnings of this agonistic struggle have been well described by Meyer Schapiro: the emphasis on touch, on texture, and on gesture in modern painting is a consequence of the division of labor inherent in industrial production. Industrial capitalism banished the hand from the process of production; the work of art alone, as craft, still im- plied manual handling and therefore artists were compelled, by reaction, to demonstrate the exceptional nature of their mode of production. 22
The hand, absent though implicit through the presence of its trace in the facture of the artwork, is a synecdoche for the body. Likewise, the body is synecdoche for artist, and for the artist's self. Hand, body, artist, self, presence: these concatenated terms are implicated in the metaphor of the garden. This is not to say that the referents of these terms are simply given, or unconflicted in their use. 23 It is, however, to suggest that in the nexus that encompasses the referents of these terms and in the framework which enables their appearance is a locus of the eternal return of painting. 24 In the end, after the end, after modernism, after postmodernism, painting returns eternally in the only way it can: at once ever and never the same. After all, as Merleau-Ponty suggests:
. . . the very first painting in some sense went to the farthest reach of the future. 25
| 1 | Mystic Garden No. 2 | oil on canvas | 12 x 12 inches |
| 2 | Poles | oil on canvas | 24 x 12 inches |
| 3 | Garden Project No. 4 | oil on canvas | 12 x 84 inches |
| 4 | Garden Project No. 3 | oil on canvas | 12 x 60 inches |
| 5 | Inner Garden No. 3 | mixed media on paper | 30 x 22.5 inches |
| 6 | Inner Garden No. 2 | mixed media on paper | 30 x 22.5 inches |
| 7 | Inner Garden No. 5 | mixed media on paper | 30 x 22.5 inches |
| 8 | Inner Garden No. 1 | mixed media on paper | 30 x 22.5 inches |
| 9 | Garden Project No. 7 | oil on canvas | 12 x 72 inches |
| 10 | Garden Project No. 1 | oil on canvas | 24 x 12 inches |
Chong Keun Chu was born in Seoul, Korea. An alumnus of Brookhaven College, 1979-1980, he
received the B. F. A. from Southern Methodist University in 1982, and the M. F. A. from Tyler
School of Art, Temple University, in 1984. An adjunct instructor of art at Brookhaven College
since 1984, Chu also teaches art at Trinity Christian Academy, Addison. Chu is represented by the
Edith Baker Gallery, Dallas.