Open Studio: Lavinia

T-yong Chung’s perception and personal experience of Italy is that of a cultural, iconographic and humanistic atlas from which he draws inebriated inspirations and thoughts.

He wanders freely, and he is curious, attentive and attracted by some fundamentals which one can easily discover in his artworks: Classical Art, Arte Povera, Minimalism. Undoubtedly, his works transcend a continuous dialogue between past and present.

Sculptor by tradition (his father is a sculptor in South Korea), he grew up in workshops and foundries. He then went on to study at the University of Seoul and then at the Brera Academy in Milan, and there he decided to settle down in Italy.

His works portray the tension between the fullness of western culture and the essentiality of oriental culture. This creates a formal balance which is difficult to add to or take away from. His sculptures are defined although they seem unfinished and his mark is delicate yet vigorous.

Often incorporating leftover materials, antique chairs, rusty tools, sheet metals, he dismantles, reassembles, smooths, polishes the remnant until it takes on a new identity , but still strongly linked to its dignified past.

His most recent works start with plaster reproductions of classical busts and concrete models of everyday objects.

He has recently started to approach the portrait subject, focusing his research more on a real person than on a symbol. Here the classical approach is always present, but a sort of contemporary humanism seems to prevail.

Lavinia is T-Yong Chung’s most recent project to be held at Fonderia Battaglia in Milan, in its Open Studio program.

Produced by Tender to Art, Tendercapital’s visual arts hub, the project will be installed and inaugurated at Fonderia Battaglia, Thursday, March 9, from 6 pm to 9 pm.

The focus of the installation will be T-yong Chung’s first work, which is a bronze sculpture of a young girls bust classically and figuratively molded, which the Korean artist has reinterpreted based on his usual technique to decontextualize a western iconographic symbol, through incisions and surface polishing.

For T-yong Chung Lavinia, Latinus and Amata’s daughter, Aeneas’s second wife, portrayed as a child, represents Mediterranean femininity, the purity and the complexity of a woman figure.

Lavinia is an installation through which the shaping of a bronze bust using different materials and colors (plaster, clay, colored wax), are absorbed by the young face portrayed during the process itself. The result is an identifiable process of a cycle that repeats itself.

The object is characterized by what it shields and tells; it finds a new vitality in its estranged aesthetics. T-yong Chung moves through prominent symbolisms and familiar characters, arranging them in a new order, dictated by his sensitivity which sways between two profoundly different cultures.