Chun Kwang Young is a Korean artist known for his textural and crystalline paper sculptures. Born in Hongcheon, South Korea in 1944, Chun grew up in Korea during a time marked by Japanese colonization and the Korean War, both of which impacted his artistic process. Chun studied at the Hong-Ik University in Korea, receiving a BFA in art in 1968.

In his twenties, Chun was drawn to America – particularly the American dream and its juxtaposition with the inequality, poverty, and war existent in a country where democracy supposedly flourished. In the 1970s, Chun first traveled to America to continue his artistic education, receiving an MFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in Pennsylvania.

Chun was inspired by the popular movement of abstract expressionism, and through abstract expressionism, Young found a way to express his conflicting emotions about the growing gap between ideals and reality. Chun appreciated the freedom of abstract expressionism, where colors and brushstrokes broke from the constraints of academic painting to express questions of chaos and struggle. His initial works are precisely this - chaotic combinations of colors and forms.

In the 1990s, Chun began to delve into his Korean identity. He was unhappy with co-opting an art style popularised by others and sought to create his own method of artistic expression. Returning to Korea, Chun continued working but continued to question his artistic identity. Chun hit a turning point In 1995 as he broke convention and left his brush and canvas in favor of a new material: traditional Korean mulberry paper, or Hanji, traditionally used for writing and packaging drugs or food.

Chun, who had long wished to express his art through Korean sentiment, found a way to express collective memory in large scale pieces made with the Hanji paper. Through using individually hand cut polystyrene triangles of Hanji paper covered in ancient Korean or Chinese texts Chun provides, in his own words, ‘a window reflecting visions of humanity.’

This shift in medium was inspired by a nostalgic moment Chun had while ill in which he remembered a neighborhood doctor, fear of needles, and a ceiling full of individual, Hanji-wrapped packages with a name card of the medicine it contained. His memories of seeing medicinal herbs wrapped, treated, and packaged in Hanji influenced his paper-working technique, with Chun further coloring the paper with tea and natural dyes to give the impression that his sculptures are not man made.

Chun Kwang Young’s works of assembled mulberry papers are called Aggregations. To the artist, they are a combination of memories, a conversation between individual pieces and the larger piece they create, as well a nod to his original artistic beginnings in Abstract Expressionism.

Each color and shape within Chun’s Kwang Young’s art represents something to the artist. For example, black featured in his work is representative of death, nonexistence, censorship, and destruction of historical fact happening across the world.

While his works are often circular shapes, triangular shapes within his work represent basic units of information, with depictions of scar-like shapes meant to call to our individual bodies and the scarred diplomatic relations, borders, and wars that surround us. Each minimalistic piece makes up a methodical whole; a reflection of the artist’s past and present global circumstances.

Chun Kwang Young has received many awards for his works, such as the Artist of the Year from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul and the Presidential Prize in the 41st Korean Culture and Art Prize. His works are shown globally – from New York to London to Seoul – and are featured in numerous private and public collections. Today, Chun Kwang Young is 77 and still creating art in Seongnam, Korea.