The new works of Chong Keun Chu grow from seeds long planted in his earlier work. Painting, like planting seeds, like gardening, like farming, is an act of faith. Seeds are planted not knowing if rain will come, not knowing if growth will follow, not knowing the outcome. Still, seeds are planted. Rain comes, and growth follows, the outcomes of the decisions enailed in the facture of the works become visible. In these works, what was foreshadowed in Chu's previous paintings is brought forth in a new and concentrated form.
Chu's paintings emphasize the relation of figure and ground. Painting, indeed all art making, is in its most primal aspect the differencing of figure and ground; at this level artmaking is a model of all makings, grounded in the everyday lived experience of perception. In these new works figure-ground relationships are primary. The figures are achromatic black shapes, organic forms reduced to nearly geometric abstractions, placed in a luminous field of relatively light value. The contrast of light-dark value between figure and ground is therefore substantial. The ground is of indefinite depth, comprised of an chromatic, amorphic field of broken color. The figures are kept parallel to the image plane, without overlapping, further flattening the space and concentrating attention to the shapes and their relationships to each other and to the format of the field. The strong shapes of the figures, the solidity and density of their black forms, the crisp edges of their delineation, are in distinction from the more atmospheric ground. Sometimes figure and ground reverse, conspicuously so in Dreamer's Shadow, Cut and Paste #3 and Cut and Paste # 4, implying at once the reciprocal relation of figure and ground, the implicit antecedent state of the support prior to differentiation into figure and ground, and the role of viewer response in the perception of figure and of ground, which as entailing change always already implies a temporal aspect.
This body of work deploys three structures. Gateway, Providence (Grand Mother), Providence II (Father), Bud #1, and Bud # 2 employ a central vertically oriented oval enclosing a smaller form. This structure is evocative of protective enclosure in separating interior from exterior, private from public, sacred from profane. Gardner I, Gardner's Shapes, Air and Seed, and Dancing Flower have a central structure comprised of a constellation of smaller forms. The structure evokes development, unfolding. Cut and Paste # 1, Twin Tree, Wish Tree, Dreamer's Shadows I, Male and Female I, Cut and Paste # 2, Cut and Paste # 3, Cut and Paste # 4 have two or more vertical shapes extending from the lower to the upper edges of the field. In this group of works, the verticality of the forms evokes the upwardness of growth against the constraint of gravity.
What is crucial in these works is not simply the shapes themselves, for all their evocative resonances, but their relationships: to the ground from which they emerge and which their emergence enables as a ground, to each other, and to the format of the field. Relationships are forces. In these works, tensions and releases attain a dynamic equilibrium. The paintings are still, yet filled with the energy of life.
Chu's paintings are nature naturing. They are not the imitation of nature, certainly not the illusion of specific natural objects, but rather the imitation of nature in its manner of operation. But before and after all of that, these are paintings about painting, which is undertaken as an act of faith, in which one begins without knowing the outcome.