We Are Infinite

Clarence Chun

BLANC Gallery

BLANC Gallery proudly presents Clarence Chun’s second solo exhibit with the gallery entitled “We Are Infinite”. Pushing the boundaries of visual standards in size, format, and medium, Clarence Chun produces an astounding panorama of surging analog design to the cybernetic streams of subjectivity and identity, along with the shifting notions of place and orientation, following the exchange and encounters over material, besides imaging the worldwide transmission of data and the construction of value. Chun gives us an updated expression of abstraction under the radiant glow of networked culture while probing the personal and the limits of narrative in painting.

“We Are Infinite” is an epic painting of thirty feet in length and four feet in height flooding the gallery immediately with a dynamic wave. There appears no center in the picture essentially, where the flow seems to begin and where it is supposed to end – emerging simultaneously in time and space. Rather, there is an intensification and profusion of forms – full mass, fragmentary parts, or residual traces, just past halfway in the spatial journey, that somewhere here the gaze meets the thing closest to the viewing aperture of where one is. Everything is actively in motion, speeding. Thus, a white stream spanning the full horizon curves and swerves on random points in space, a dip in direction on each bend pulls the shape downwards, sideways, or askew, but en route to a greater momentum that continues to push forward, slinging again and shooting on the opposite side – only to appear yet again stretched further from its contour, thereby building its hold on things, tethering with great effect. There are also other carrier streams behaving this way in the expanse: blues in various shade and mixture, a burgeoning band of vacuum black in addition – all visibly present according to the wavelength of light bouncing across the surface.

The picture in total is ocean-wide in depths and flows, an oscillation of unbridled energy, cascading with a climactic build-up through creation – the universe always beginning and never ending: the alpha and the omega. Thus, Chun’s panoptic tour-de-force is omnipresent: through the silver surf of cyberspace, passing the many gatefold doors of perception, diving into the enveloping fog of memory. Accordingly, the artist deems his work like the echoes of the mind: the distinct phenomena of that lived moment lasting forever with reverberating effect – a wave, that is, with its surf coming to shore from a much larger sea, our subconscious, the soul. Images stemming from inner states are usually never perfect duplicates of the most significant matter, with regards to real things, they become the Other in this way, reliable in their indeterminacy as metaphors of memory, but never the basis of truth, and yet this is the only thing one could possess, this uncanny instinct for life.

Memory commits you to the nuance, the fog.

If you act on memory, you commit yourself on the basis of echoes.

No basis on which to inch out across your life, and yet all you have.

• John Harrison

Chun recreates certain incarnations of past incidents through amalgams of anamorphic design and painterly gesture formed from bits of subjective information and other signs floating from existence. As an assemblage of life, a construct with randomized artificial meaning, they serve as conductors in a fluctuating field of time and space. History and place collapse altogether into recurring motifs of various scale and gravity – accessible by recall; such as, walls are enclosures and diversions, while holes are incidental passages – both opportunity and terminal ends. The diagrammatic folds set the inside and outside altogether in place, regardless of where their plots are, akin to gates of basic circuitry having many internal passes but with one output and no memory – it is a conduit.

And so following a widescreen narrative format, Chun’s painting allows intermittent stops along the line, toggling time like machine editing for film, recollecting symbolic events in multiple perspectives and focus, desiring to expose the plot and close the narrative. Along this silvery screen, images flicker in and out of their time segments, simulating the integrity of memory, but held only by its dimming echo, the sound fading raucous like marbles clashing, they fragment in space. As simulacra of biography, the forms here are composites of stock iconography from the artist’s design lexicon, painter’s forms, and gestural marks that fly off from their integral composition creating random glitches in the system, like stuttering machines buzzing in flight. Yet, there is a physicality present in the paintings that belie the celluloid perfection of its surface. Furthermore, visible somewhere over and in-between the layers of paint are the artist’s own perspectival diagrams that disrupt the painting’s passages like a computer’s graphic interface or windows for accessing archived information, often times too there appears notes of the artist’s process, in order somehow to reveal the conceit of the image, peeling off the illusion like onion skin.

Chun explores the irony of seamless machine-like aesthetic with an abstract-expressionist aplomb of intricate impasto marks, pools of spills and swirling drips of paint that skid across the smooth surface. It does recall here Jackson Pollock’s celebrated paintings consisting similar gestural spills and drips, with an analogous horizontal span that made an impression with the artist about Pollock’s work, which seem to eradicate physical space in its fluctuating vantage points as well as demolishing durational experience while being lost within the painting’s cosmos. Chun wants those who would encounter his painting to be inside of it, echoing Pollock, where the viewer can be: “On pace physically with the painting and with time. Hopefully, there is a feeling of catching a wave or keeping up with a wave.” Chun bridges the divide between traditional media and the new, slowing time down with meticulously handcrafted technical designs that correspond with the depth of human experience and imagination, while reflecting on the speed of contemporary life made possible by technological advancement in the fields of communication, visualization, and production.

Text by Arvin Flores