Helene Heehyoun Chung

Artist’s Statement

My current works are abstractions drawn mainly from the distant memories I have of landscapes that I have seen throughout my travels.  Those memories as inchoate ideas are filtered, reshaped, and recomposed.

I start a painting with complex marks, creating chaos to experiment with the visual space.  The painting undergoes many transformations, until it becomes mired in a frantic confusion.  Attacking the paint surface with abandon and my own dynamic sense, I avoid being neat and tightly locked.  Towards the end, I simplify the painting by destroying earlier marks, leaving some hints of what has been there.  In this way,

I try to create a painting that becomes an evocation of memory.

Painting abstractly is a chance to be utterly free.