Born in Daegu in 1948, Chong Gon Byun wages a battle at the crossroads of freedom and oppression. As a figure at the forefront of Hyperrealism, he was awarded the grand prize at the first Dong-a Ilbo Art Exhibition in 1978, but soon he had to move to America to escape political oppression and excessive surveillance. Though his life in America was difficult to the point that he was “carrying death around in [his] pocket,” enjoying a creative liberty that would have been unheard of in Korea allowed him to cultivate his artistic practice.
Read MoreHe began collecting these discarded objects, one at a time, and taking them apart. He felt both a certain warmth from these objects that had been so callously thrown away and recognized his own loneliness in them. He wanted to express the irony of a world where the people who had abandoned these objects later played a role in their creation and to depict the ills and problems that come with living in it.
Byun adopted a new artistic style— a new technique called assemblage that departed from established artistic trends of the late 20th century like Pop art or abstract art. Byun’s work fuses the novelty of his combination of two distinct objets with the greatest tool in his artistic arsenal, hyperrealism. Attempting to reinterpret the values, norms, and orders upheld by members of modern society, his method of communicating this message to the public more closely resembles a clear linguistic form that transcends the ambiguity of modern art. By making great strides in the U.S., Byun played a significant role in attracting interest in Asian cultures that were still largely unfamiliar in America. Not bound by any particular ideology, he consistently displayed many of his objets on the American stage. He proudly received a warm welcome home alongside Nam June Paik at the 1988 Summer Olympics hosted in Korea. Byun’s works were later celebrated and appreciated in Korea and displayed in exhibitions at the Gwangju Museum of Art and Pohang Museum of Steel Art in 2014.
