I need to believe by Sunny Chyun
Exhibition will be open to public from 10 - 23 September 2008
The paintings in Sunny Chyun’s solo exhibition “I need to believe” use landscape as a metaphor to mediate on the material world. Although the perversely seductive "vessels" that populate the paintings register as molecules, cells or embryos, these “vessels” represent the inherent nature of being, disengaged from material embodiment.
As the vessels evolve, crusade, and decay, they narrate a psychological journey towards the paradisiacal. The vessels form a disjointed community of nebulous identities, each with little sense of belonging or purpose. Although this anxiety of dislocation largely references a mobile life, it is largely taken from the artist’s personal experiences of constantly relocating between Korea, Singapore and the US. Continuing in the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, the painting process is led by emotion and instinct over pictorial conventions. It involves an alchemical process that physically transforms paint into image, illuminating the tension between the prosaic material world and the poetic immaterial world, as well as the transformation of action into thought. In this organic process, layers of splashes, swirls and drips converge to create a subconscious reference to the cyclical growth, evolution, and decay of the natural world. The exhibition questions the need to believe in the purpose for existence and then explores possibilities of hope for renewal and escape. The need here comes from not just existential angst, social insecurities or spirituality, but from the human urge to question and procreate.
