Kwang Young Chun 1944

Kwang Young Chun is a Korean artist best known for his textural, crystalline paper sculptures. He uses tea and other natural dyes to color mulberry paper to give the impression that his sculptures are not manmade. Chun’s childhood recollections of seeing medicinal herbs wrapped, treated, and packaged influenced the development of his paper-working technique. His work explores themes of harmony and conflict, as with his famed Aggregation series of large-scale sculptures made of triangular parts created from discarded books. In his own words, the Korean artist is concerned with “expressing the power of our ancestors’ spirit,” and reflecting on “a painful modern society.” Born in 1944 in Hongchun, South Korea, he studied at Hong-Ik University in Korea and received his MFA from the Philadelphia College of Art. Prior to 1995, when the artist began working with mulberry paper, he painted in a manner influenced by American and European Abstract Expressionism. Chun has been named Artist of the Year by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, and was awarded the Presidential Prize in the 41st Korean Culture and Art Prize by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. In 2014, Chun authored Mulberry Mindscapes, a monograph articulating the breadth and diversity of his half-century long artistic career. The artist’s works are in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Seoul National University Museum of Art, and the Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, among others. He lives and works in Seoul, South Korea.

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