In Korean culture, the tendency for accumulation might be seen through the long-held tradition of piling pebbles as a commemorative act toward the dead. The result of Chun's efforts at culture fusion started paying off big-time. For the past decade or so Chun's objects and their bristling surfaces have been riveting Western and non-Western audiences with the new level of intensity, inventiveness, and unpredictability that pervades his wall works and, recently, his large-scale in-the-round constructions. Over the years Chun has perfected his unique approach to his work, finding and exploiting the minute variations in his process of carefully wrapping mulberry paper around triangular shards of Styrofoam. The artist then ties the paper around these wedge shapes with mulberry threads. Finally, he arranges thousands of these differently sized units, patinaed with age and use, and secures them to rigid support surfaces. Aggregation, an apt title for his ongoing suite of high-density, labor-intensive, and baroquely patterned new works, suggests the massing of minerals formed into solid rock. Applied in pure and financial mathematics, as well as in theoretical physics, the term aggregation alludes to the network of molecular-like patterns that form the skin of his works' prickly surfaces. The artist uses vintage hanji paper (often a half-century old) gathered from Kwang-young Chun: Korean Mulberry Paper Paintings and Sculpture dominique nahas kwang-young chun Kim Foster Gallery, New York September 7–October 21, 2006 Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery, New York September 6–October 21, 2006 Aggregation 06-JN028, 2006, 100 inches diameter, hanji and mixed media. All photos courtesy of Kim Foster Gallery, New York. winter 2006 - 41 reviews many sources such as books and packaging that he has systematically gathered and cataloged over several decades on his travels throughout Korea's rapidly fading rural villages. In some sense he could be seen as hanji's cultural ambassador who has taken into account this material's origin, rich history, and role in the everyday, mindful of its aesthetic and symbolic value in Korea's past and present. For the artist each parcel of mulberry paper contains and represents an aspect of the soul of the individual who interacted with each surface. He wants his art forms to embody the traces of the millions of anonymous hand-touches that his found papers have felt over time. The experience of loss is being played out, clearly, in this work. Just as fundamentally, Chun's magicalization of surfaces through his urge to deepen the haptic conditions of the work gives fetishistic undertones (both cultic and relic), and suggests the artist's recognition of inescapable devotional intensities embedded in Korean traditions, whether religious or not. I asked the artist if in some way his work could be construed as historical artifacts. He agreed, replying: "I want my work to be remembrance pieces. I want to touch the heart." He also made it clear that the new work is more aggressive and less meditative than his earlier work. It is perhaps a reflection of the artist's anger and fear at what he perceives to be the irresolvable conflicts in early twentyfirst- century Korea. He feels that belligerence and tension pervade his homeland. "My work now is not comfortable work. It is still quiet yet very strong. I want the work to be received like boiling oil and fire." Importantly (and as impossible as it might seem), Chun does not hand-color, embellish, or alter the surfaces of his found papers. With a watchmaker's exactitude, he intricately creates trompe l'oeil patterns using the paper's existing tones, stains, and color residues, recalling black holes and other hauntingly delicate spatial effects. The artist, similarly, takes advantage of the existing characters on the old book or manuscript pages; the Korean and Chinese calligrams that cover the interlocking components read as extensive wordplay. The results of Chun's radiantly orchestrated intentions recall cracks, hollows, holes, craters, and voids: cosmic landscapes remorselessly subjected for eons by meteor and dust showers. Such illusionistic indentations, conjured up with hallucinatory precision, reach their apogee in sophistication and drama in the large forms entitled Aggregation 06-JN028 and Aggregation 06-JN025, both presented in Chelsea's Kim Foster Gallery. Chun's outscaled tour-de-force set pieces preclude being exhibited in the more conventionally scaled exhibition rooms in the white-shoe neighborhood where the Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery is situated. There, the viewer was offered an exhibition of ten modestly sized paintings distributed over two townhouse rooms. The lack of overt physical drama in one sense is easily compensated for by the extraordinary range of surface effects and gossamer coloration of the more intimately scaled works, an experience which rounds out our appreciation for Chun's control not only over form but over color (and thus feeling) as well. Even with the scores upon scores of simultaneous art openings kicking off the new art season in September, Kwang-young Chun's searing work which marries form and content so distinctly stood out as a public expression of something unforgettably, hauntingly personal. An excellent catalog with an essay by critic Jonathan Goodman on Chun's latest Aggregation work is available for purchase at both gallery venues. Aggregation 06-JN025, 2006, 158 x 79 x 75 inches, hanji and mixed media. Detail of Aggregation 06-JL032, 2006, 90 x 63 inches, hanji and mixed media.