Korean artist Heemin Chung (b. 1987) has witnessed the transformation of her home city of Seoul into a technological metropolis over the course of her lifetime. In this buzzing city, the boundaries of night and day no longer exist. Cell phones, laptop screens, glowing billboards, and streetlights create a perpetual twilight where rest is regarded as obsolete.

In “Umbra” Chung’s solo debut at Thaddeus Ropac which opens in London today, the rising artist attempts to navigate these forces, which have “reoriented our experience of life beyond recognizability.” Chung’s new works encompass painting, sculpture, and video work and bridge inspirations from ancient Korean culture with cutting-edge technological processes. The exhibition title “Umbra” references the shadows cast by celestial bodies such as the earth and moon, where darkness still exists. In these new works, Chung seems to argue for the necessity of night, disconnection, and even death.

Heemin Chung, From the Old Prophet (2024).© Heemin Chung. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London.Photo: artifacts

“There is a traditional play, the Dasiraegi (Rebirth), I have been interested in for years.  It’s a melodramatic but simple story of a woman deceiving her husband,” Chung told me from her current residency studio at ISCP in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. “Her husband is blind. The woman falls in love with a monk and has a child.” The play, Chung explained, is typically performed as part of the Korean funerary ritual called the Chobun. “The possibility of new life and laughter and profane jokes are all part of this mourning process,” said Chung.

Heemin Chung, The Sleeping Birds – Thin, Ambiguous, Abstract, and Intermediate – Which Decided to Be Engraved on the Expanded Land Was Already There but Nowhere to Be Found (2024), © Heemin Chung. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul. Photo: artifacts

In the Ropac exhibition, Chung has reimagined the play and the funerary rite in a series of multimedia sculptures incorporating video that are reworked into two timelines—one of her childhood and the other, a day in the life of her grandfather. These sculptures are presented on a stage-like LED platform that echoes this sense of theatricality.

Here too, new paintings are presented alongside the sculptures. Her paintings are made through a digital-meets-traditional process she first developed in 2017.  The artist translates images she’s found on the Internet or photographed herself into 3-D prints made in a gel material. In their 3-D printed iteration, these images are desaturated from their hues and become shadow visions of themselves. The final works are draped and folded, sculptural, veil-like surfaces.

“I model these gel forms on the surface and then I cover them with paint. For me, this process is a rhetorical question of how I can come back into my body,” she explained. “Through my process, I collect and reanimate dead data from the world around me.”

Heemin Chung, I Walked on the Snow. In the Eerie Reflection on the Icy Thin Ground, I Drowned Like an Ant in Sugar Water(2024).© Heemin Chung. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery. Photo: artifacts

Earlier series focused on flowers, and at times were reminiscent of the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe in their final forms. These most recent paintings she likens to landscapes. For this series, she photographed objects from the natural world: shells, bark, feathers, car shells, flowers, and potholes during early morning walks through Seoul. For Chung, these vignettes speak to the rebirth and decline that still exist in her home city, even if often ignored in the name of innovation. “Seoul is an ever-changing city that has been modernized rapidly since my childhood. It feels like a completely different city and much has been lost in that process,” she explained.

Heemin Chung, Wounded Soul With Phantom Foreignness, Yet Something Remains (2024).© Heemin Chung. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London. Photo: artifacts

For these canvases, Chung has employed a subtle palette that hovers between white, black, and gray with hints of bruised purple and pink. The tones are reminiscent of various atmospheric phenomena from fog to the break of dawn.

Ultimately, the artist sees her process as one of both loss and retrieval.  “There is a dissolution in this city, with the accelerated media culture, and I want to express the physicality and emotions that exist,” she said.  Scenes from real life are flattened into data, and the experiences of texture and dimensionality are erased. Through these works, Chung  “rematerializes” data to suggest new, open-ended possibilities for the future. Chung believes in painting’s potential to encompass our new lived experiences and ways of seeing the world. In joining together these competing forces of digital imagery, printed sculpture, and painting, her artworks offer a noise-canceling thrum, where a kind of tranquility is offered to wearied contemporary minds and bodies.

“Heemin Chung: Umbra” is on view at Thaddeus Ropac, London, through November 20, 2024.