Exhibition Information

			The PIBI GALLERY presents <LUCID>, the first solo exhibition of Nakhee Sung from November 5th to December 26th, 2020. Using the flat formative language of painting, Sung has been expressing organic and abstract pictures on her canvases that are not only intuitive but structurally compositional in form. This exhibition will showcase her new work Elation, a piece that departs from the same notion as the serial works <Transpose> (2018) and <Sequence> (2019), but one that is more in-depth abstract painting that is typical of the artist.

In Sung’s abstract paintings, we see motion of organically fluid, floating colors acquiring balance on the picture plane via surfaces that come to be with her brushstrokes along with unrestricted shapes and forms. She has been establishing her own style of painting by intuitively building – without any base drawings – organic spaces on flat surfaces using various tones of color and adept brushworks. Repeated movements of spontaneous brushstrokes accumulate into layers, at times paving ever-flowing water-like currents and paths. The parts that come to be on the canvas are intimately related to each other, being filled yet emptied, in disarray yet woven, thus depicting an interactive communication of sorts and acquiring a gradually intensifying quality. While the harmonic composition created by the movements of the artist beckon us to find a kind of order or rule within, the artist is actually more focused not on a prescribed frame or method, but on finding the overall balance of a space filled with direct and uninhibited brushwork.

Introduced in this exhibition, the serial work Elation is similar in composition with the artist’s <Transpose> (2018) and <Sequence> (2019) series, a piece that is a more intensified and varied demonstration of the artist’s perspective on the abstract that has been steadily linked and manifested over time.
With a spontaneous yet focused sense of style, Sung has chosen to build colored planes and forms on top of each other to show the resulting energy of the aggregate in a rhythmic way resembling the melodic cadence of music.. Beginning in 2018 with her <Transpose> and again in 2019 with the <Sequence> series, we see the artist honing more into elements of painting, newly bringing into her canvas densely painted colors and surfaces with concentrated sense of space. Such works, while demonstrating the artist’s view on the abstract, calls more attention to her movements with enlarged and layered images that comfortably reside between the occupied spaces of the works. As Sung backtracks the traces left by her brushstrokes, building, meticulously tuning, and polishing them – as if constructing a path – what she is inevitably left with is a canvas full of impressions and traces left by her brush. Moreover, the composition of surfaces, set in balance and repeatedly created, makes viewers focus more on the nature of space atop a canvas that is gradually stacked and built with a dynamic yet serene energy. It is about concentrating on an abstract structure that is the visualization of the state of maintained gaps, naturally formed as a result of certain actions. In addition, the formative beauty brought about by the intuitive works of the brush seems to achieve its own kind of unrestricted yet architectural composition and build.

Sung’s abstract works are said to have a system where succinct flat surfaces of color - formed from restrained decisiveness - are gradually added to the canvas, pushing and pulling on each other. Having come about from improvisational decisions, such structures are difficult to predict but while their individual elements become entangled with each other to create taut tension, they also come together and embrace each other to demonstrate harmony. Sung’s paintings are full but not yet filled, are completed yet unfinished. She pours continuous and meticulous care into each and every one of those incomplete parts in order to move closer to perfection, and thus acquires temporality. She goes further by composing a canvas of depth that dually embodies the parts and the whole as well as the interior and the exterior, stirring a sober and compelling perspective regarding the artist’s thoughts about painting itself and her methods of approach.
This LUCID exhibition of Sung will be a valuable opportunity in terms of getting a glimpse into the ever-persistently contemplated abstract world of the artist, in addition to sharing with viewers the compositional elements of her previous works. Especially worthy to note is her recent work Elation, which, with its extended horizontal hard-edged element, invites us to pay even closer attention to the embodied power of Sung’s intuitive picture planes.
Nakhee Sung, born in 1971, has been producing abstract images for the last twenty years using the most basic of expressive elements, to paint motion and forms of color that move rhythmically like music, with cadence, or floating freely like organically fluid. From her early paintings of uninhibited and energetic movements to recent works that focus more on plastic balance, Sung offers an intriguing in-depth perspective she has steadily developed through the years in her own style. Her continuous experimentation with color and her intuitive yet structurally systematic composition are elements that inevitably call attention to her paintings.