When Ruth was 16, she and her family were interned along with 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry who lived along the West Coast of the United States. For many, the upheaval of losing everything, most importantly their right to freedom and a private, family life, caused irreparable harm. For Ruth, the internment was the first step on a journey to a world of art that profoundly changed who she was and what she thought was possible in life. In 1994, when she was 68 years old, she reflected on the experience: “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am.”

Zig Zag
oil on paper, 6.75″ x 3″, 1946

“To me, the Mandala symbolizes the pose of the human mind. And, from the Mandala, I seek and find ‘absolute peace.’ To me, the world of beauty exists in the heart with pure peace, and in such a heart, artistic works that are honest are created. To me, Mandala does not necessarily denote the Buddhist Mandala. It is a state of mind.”
– Chun Sung Woo

Known for his Mandala works, Sung-woo Chun started his career by exhibiting 18 pieces of Mandala works in Seoul in April 1965 upon returning from a 12-year stay in the States. Since then, he has consistently exhibited many more Mandala works up until the creation of the Chungwha Mandalas in the 1990’s. Besides the title of Mandala Artist, Chun has been recognized by critics for “the natural description of the Oriental way of thinking by adopting abstract expressionism.”

In the 1950’s, the Pacific coast area of San Francisco Bay was one of the two central areas of the American contemporary art, developing the original school called the Bay Area Figurative School, distinguished from the New York Abstract Expressionism. It was in the San Francisco area that Chun studied as a student at the California School of Fine Arts (presently San Francisco Art Institute). CFSA played a central role in the flourishing of contemporary art in the Western area of the USA and majorly impacted Chun by impressing the fundamentals of abstract art that would later determine his artistic style.

Excerpted from writings of Chul-hyo Kim, Art Historian, General Manager of Archives & Library at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art

Like other Koreans studying abroad, Chun took a deeper interest in his native country and the East when he was in the States than when he was living in his homeland of Korea. As a consequence, his abstract paintings were elevated to works more Oriental in themes and form. It is a well-known fact that abstract expressionism was more inspired by the thoughts and art of the East Asian region. Therefore, the prevalent view is to understand the worlds of Asian artists with Oriental lyricism, though different in technique, as a branch that absorbed the influence of abstract expressionism.

Excerpted from writings of Young Mok Jung, Art Historian, Seoul National University

50 Year of Refined Art:
Yung-nam Park on Chun Sung Woo

“I have a photograph that I cherish. It is a commemorative picture of the freshman at the Department of Arts, Seoul National University, at Yeon-geon-dong in 1969. In the first row, there is Mr. Jong-yeong Kim, Then the dean of the Department of Arts, full-time instructors at his sides, and the 70 students standing in the back rows. At the fifth seat from the right of the first row, there is Mr. Sung-woo Chun, or Woosong by pen name and at the back row. I was there, myself standing. The steep stairs were ideal for picture taking. The stairs were also meaningful because the students walked up to the art studio through those stairs for their classes at the Department of Painting. Walking down the stairs, we used to enjoy the entire view of the campus below – the stairs were indeed memorable to students majoring in painting.

It was in the art studio that I met Woosong. It was a landscape painting class. Pointing to one of the student’s landscape paintings, he used to start by asking “shall we try turning this picture upside down?” followed by the next question, “shall we try turning this picture upside down?” followed by the next question, “How do you feel looking at the same inverted picture?” When there was no particular answer, he then continued, “If you don’t feel uncomfortable in looking at the inverted picture, you can be reassured that harmony exists among the colored spaces. This is the harmony that makes our visual perception comfortable.” His lecture went on to explain that the forms in colors are necessarily correlated with the spaces of their background. He added that, if we are to paint apples, the background of the apples is as important as the apples themselves. In other words, he suggested that good management of the background automatically lead to the natural form of apples.

His remark in point is still vivid in my memory. Even though I had been trying to paint for a long time before coming to the College of Art, I had no idea until that moment that the form of the object is determined by the space of the background. I instantly fell into an abyss rather than joy by the new finding. I felt that I was being emptied in to a void. When I had finally emptied myself, I got to be accustomed to being refilled little by little, and it was quite joyful, It reminds me of the concept of Positive Space and Negative Space. To create a space of depth, there should be some power for the space of colors to push and pull each other. It was a first-time experience for me, who had thought that colors were always subordinate means of expressions, to realize that colors can be independent subjects that take dynamic forms. This is how I first met Mr. Chun and 40 years have passed ever since.”

Mandala Box: Golden Phoenix #1
Mixed Media, 10 x 7 x 3.5 inches, 1998

Mandala Box: Yacha
Mixed Media, 10 x 7 x 3.5 inches, 1998

Chungwa Mandala: Cloud Sea #72
Oil on Canvas, 24 x 41 inches, 2004

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The greater body of Villa’s art has been an exploration of cultural identity. He freely appropriated and assimilated imagery, traditional materials, and ideas from his own Filipino heritage as he reinvented a cultural vocabulary for Filipino Americans one step removed from the source of such a rich culture. It is the same impetus that moved him to pioneer the study of Filipino and Filipino American art history. Works such as Coat (1979), drew inferences between ceremonial attire, cultural artistry, and the role of a twentieth-century artist-as-shaman in re-presenting an old culture to new generations. Villa furthered this transcultural connection between tradition and artistic reinvention in a series of performance art pieces, such as Ritual (1980), in which the artist absorbed and enacted the essence of cultural shamanism, translating it in to an act of aesthetic experience.

Concurrent with these widely celebrated explorations of heritage and art, Villa was also creating a body of work less culturally identifiable, but no less pertinent to the individual. This work was much more minimal in nature: not minimalist as an adherent of a particular school of art, but minimal as a means of seeking the essence of humanity beneath the over-layering of cultural identity. The aesthetic results are both more challenging to read, and more relevant to the universal experience of being human.

Villa’s installation of works at the Triton Museum of Art consists of a series of finely crafted cabinets, each containing a grid of assembled panels. Their presentation is clean, precise, and, as in all of Villa’s work, laden with conceptions of history, time, relations, and the meaning of cultural identity and human experience. Each cabinet is made of wood and hinged so that its contents can be hidden from view, or open to examination. In this they are akin to a medieval altarpiece or a Joseph Cornell assemblage box. The interior panels, assembled and unified, though still separate, are the treasures contained inside their wooden reliquaries, awaiting the understanding of the viewer, should she or he be desirous of receiving its mysteries.

The panel blocks arranged inside the open book-like cases form a community of interdependent units. In each community there are interplays of lines made from the actual separation and joining of the panels, and lines artificially etched on to their surfaces. As the artist suggests, these lines may represent the delineation of time between events, space between dates, or geographic and cultural separation between people. Yet across these lines flows the inherent grain of the various woods, forming complex patterns of natural similarities that transcend the artificial boundaries of separation. We are left to ponder what kind of wood is used, its color, the presence or absence of applied patina like the external layering of separate cultural identities, and the complexity of grain densities suggesting the deeper core of shared human nature. Human identity, be it individual or as a member of a community, is to the artists, the essence of what matters most. It is this essence that is given visual voice and treasured in its own altarpiece cabinet(s). If Villa’s cultural explorations are a guide for those outside of that particular heritage to understand ‘the Other,’ then this body of work represents the artist’s attempt to help us understand ourselves on a universal level. The assembled panels are a visual metaphor, and Villa is the poet of that vision.

Accompanying this latest work are three series of photographs documenting some of the artist’s earlier universal explorations of humanity through his own minimalist vocabulary. Together with the newer cabinet pieces, they provide a more complete view of Villa’s attempts to portray what he sees as the essence of the human experience.

In addition to an extensive exhibition career, Carlos Villa is a noted historian, activist, and lecturer. He currently teaches art at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the University of San Francisco.

- Preston Fletcher (view article)

Beseeching 3

www.Carlos-Villa.com
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