Over a brief artistic career spanning less than two decades, Chun Kuk Kwang is considered to have assumed and then re-established the tradition of abstract sculpture within Korean modernism. His work can be explained with just the two terms 'overlapping' and 'piling up.' Fundamentally, it represents an experiment with mass. To complete his sculptural work, he layered and stacked up a wide range of materials, including stone, bronze, paper, and wood. Through this process, the collected mass reveals an ambivalent nature in which density conflicts with emptiness. Chun's best-known series, Inner Mass, reveals both the interior and exterior surfaces of sculptures. For example, the piece made by stacking sticks appears as a mass overall, but at the same time it displays the empty spaces created between the branches. The artist also constructed paper structures but peeled away the surfaces to reveal the frame, and took rocks to pieces to create sculptures that appear to be a pile of smoothly processed stones. Through this labor-intensive effort at filling and emptying, Chun developed his own artistic language and literally showed the 'inner mass.'
