A new suite of paintings by Korean artist Suejin Chung will be on view at Arario Gallery New York, March 6-April 30, 2009.

Chung takes an analytical approach to painting that has been summarized as “a visual language that exists in a completely different dimension than that of letters or words.” In multi-layered and color saturated canvases she depicts strange environments filled with people, individual body parts, shapes, symbols, and foodstuffs. Though her paintings appear to result from free association, they are mathematically and theoretically complex compositions of both the figurative and abstract, interior and exterior spaces. Chung suggests that to understand painting is to understand the multi-dimensionality of human consciousness. “Therefore,” she writes, “you do not need to ask what [a] painting means anymore.”

The painting pictured above, Crag (2008), was included in the recent exhibition Metamorphoses: Korean Trajectories at Éspace Louis Vuitton in Paris. This piece exemplifies Chung’s style of painting and simultaneous attention to disorder and structure. Her newest works, which have never before been shown to the public, comprise Arario Gallery New York’s exhibition. The paintings range from crowded compositions like Crag, in which human heads and organs; artichokes; building rods; paper airplanes; and other fragments swarm the canvas; to surreal mountainous landscapes; and portraits of a lone woman wearing a kerchief on her head, a recurring motif in Chung’s work.

Born in 1969, Suejin Chung lives and works in Seoul, Korea. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995), and her BFA from Hong IK University in Korea (1992). Her work has been shown at Peres Projects, Berlin; Union Gallery, London; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; the Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art in Gawanju.