“always a relief to see you again” Clarence Chun

Blanc Gallery

Blanc Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibit by Clarence Chun “always a relief to see you again,” featuring large scale paintings and mixed media works that redefine the notion of presence and absence using abstraction as a trope for communication and distance, painterly moments for the interstitial representation of information, and pictorial events in the determination of experience and its multiple narratives.

Enclosures define the present surrounding space, seemingly more actual than virtual, which nevertheless affect movement that forms its meaning, equating distance with experience, regulating time and movement. These boundaries demarcate the limits of reason, so to speak, as reflections of where our consciousness could go. Therefore from within, a house is built, rooms made to roam, spaces to discover. It is an architecture that seems to go endless. A labyrinth full of possibilities. Clarence Chun creates these pictorial scenarios of boundless potential: spaces that create events. Similarly, Action Painting, as termed by Harold Rosenberg for abstract expressionist paintings that approach the canvas as an arena in which to act, fills the space with various effects of gestural abstraction to render a picture of existential logic.

Here, Chun’s painterly event-spaces are perambulated by elongated bands that bend or curve and stretch beyond their rational proportions to suggest electronic superhighways, migratory paths, lines of flight, wavelengths, as well as biometric signatures or even calligraphy, which codify the transmission of identity. These gestural strokes mapping the space with abstract identifiers are accompanied by multiple deployments of paint done with drips, spills, blobs, smears, and tossed in a complex algorithm as to give the impression of movement and speed – a gravity defying, hyperbolic application of material across time and space. Such painterly product is additionally elaborated by the artist with more information from within, an aesthetic feature that Chun appears to relish. William Blake’s paradoxes “to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour,” are lines from the poem Auguries of Innocence, seem to illustrate Chun’s intentions, if not, to provide a representation of our quantum reality. Chun’s painterly elements are further removed from their direct experimentation by doing a meticulously technical enhancement of contour space, color saturation, and linear strength, as well as introducing obscure image inserts, deployed within the intricate minutiae of each painterly event that he innovates. This gesture creates a paradoxical picture of turbulent velocity with time slowed down, chaos and chance with logic and analysis, blur and stillness, rapid temperature change, and counter-narratives of abstraction and representation. In addition to Chun’s monumental painterly compositions, he has made a series of mixed media works on paper that he initiated during his separation abroad in the time of the pandemic, to give glimpses of landscape and memory and the distances that they would cover. Clarence Chun’s exhibit thusly provides a poetic vision of our estranged condition today, to reach without touch and communicate using an alternative language, to render the unknown within familiar understanding and bring comfort with the words “always a relief to see you again.”

Arvin Flores

Artist Bio

Clarence Chun received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts NY, BFA, Cum Laude at the University of Houston School of Art in Texas, and a Fellowship at Yale University School of Art. He currently lives and

works in Manila and Honolulu, Hawaii. Clarence is a Honolulu Museum of Art Artists of Hawaii 2013 and John Young Foundation Awardee. Selected exhibits at National Museum of the Philippines, Ayala Museum Artist Space, Honolulu Museum of Art, Mono8 Gallery, Artery Artist Space, Gallery Big, Blanc Gallery, Vinyl on Vinyl Gallery, West Gallery and Front Gallery, Houston.