SIKYUNG SUNG

In these oil on canvas works, meandering aleatory lines and expressive gestural brushstrokes move across swathes of color and impastoed patches, by turns intentional and intuitive, colliding and converging, layers subsumed under layers, opacity and translucence alternating with restless, exhilarating energy. Growing more effortless, more technically accomplished, Sung’s painterly language in these new works is more conscious, and more wary, of the shadow cast by the modernist elevation of abstraction to the height of aesthetic purity. The two conjoined lexical components of the exhibition title, as the artist observes, hints at this ambivalence.

SEE: What is unknown and thus more open, less controlled, without limits. Immediate expectancy.

SAW: What is known, already seen, exerting control and limits. A distant expectation.

This is the perennial challenge faced by successive generations of young painters, engaged in what is possibly the most antiquated of visual genres, even as the world hurtles toward a future in which image-making by human hands seems doomed to obsolescence: How to make it new, at least a little bit, or failing that, how to make it true, to your experience, your sensibility, your time.

The challenge is especially acute for a contemporary Asian artist like Sung, whose fluency in a visual idiom formulated primarily in the West will always be viewed with a bit of suspicion. But the riposte to such skepticism is abundant in his canvases, deftly pickpocketing the best bits from his heroes—from Willem de Kooning to Michel Majerus—and reintegrating them into a pictorial world shaped, incongruously, organically, by his own lived experience: the welter of rapidly modernizing, hyper-commercialized, politically tumultuous Korea of his young adulthood, offset by a peculiarly Korean nostalgia for an ideal society harmoniously linked to nature existing in the mist of time (arguably the predominant trope in all of modern Korean painting since its emergence in the aftermath of the Korean War).

All of this is simultaneously present in Sung’s picture plane, though fleetingly, layer upon ephemeral layer, which, the artist notes, is not unlike our experience of our ever-present screens. In this way, his canvases may be a perfect representation of our precarious mental space in these precarious times, hesitant to linger in the present moment, much less in the past, out of a persistent need for the next new thing, even if we know we’re bound to be disappointed: Our mundane Sisyphean existence encapsulated in the “heroic” Sisyphean undertaking that is painting in our time.