Sung-Pil CHAE

Chae Sung-Pil is a South Korean artist currently residing in Paris, France. Combining his paintings with the philosophy and techniques of traditional Oriental traditions together with the “quest for new ideas” expressed in Western art, Chae Sung-Pil is quickly becoming one of Korea's most established and well-known artists. Chae Sung-Pil's soil palette, collected from various trips around the world and then filtered, diluted with water and mixed with glue, creates an abstract texture on canvas reminiscent of texture of the earth itself. The soil is specially prepared on mulberry paper and often mixed with Chinese ink and powdered silver and gold dust. The organic mixture is then applied onto the canvas with a large brush or brooklets of water, which interact with the soil through slight tilts in the canvas.

Chae Sung-Pil is a doctoral candidate for Plastic Arts in the University of Paris. He holds an MA and BA from Seoul National University and a second Masters from Université Rennes. He has had solo exhibitions throughout France, South Korea and China and took part in the 2014 London Art Fair, 2012 Art Basel and 2011 London Art Fair as of late.

“'Soil' is Chae Sung-Pil's keyword. He talks about it profusely and his painting is a proof of that: he uses luminous muds as pigments. But it's not the original soil, that first glebe that some like Giono or Péguy highlighted with certain nostalgia. But Chae Sung-Pil sees the soil as a burning source, the material of cosmic forces. This process deterritorialised the light, fluid and aerial soil. There is no horizon but it does not mean, as Chae Sung-Pil insists, that he renounced to a terrestrial image that he calls ‘the soil space'.

His painting constantly fluctuates between changing speeds and angle of descent, between an art of gesture and an art of stain, an experiment of material flow and a landscape suggestion. Nevertheless his canvases are not “traditional” landscapes as they might end up surrounded, framed and even overcoded by some figurative organiser window. He would have needed Monet or Cézanne's ingenuity to escape it and turn the landscaped soil into the key elements crossing it, fragmenting it and liquefying it. Chae Sung-Pil must be identified with them more than with contemporary artists who used soil as a material as he does.

Of course, Chae Sung-Pil's canvases are nothing like Cézanne's. But it is not about resemblance! Mimicking Cézanne would lead to one of these awful postmodern mockeries impeding our contemporary art cymas. And Chae Sung-Pil distrusts any illusionist mimicry of nature. He is absolutely unique while questioning the modern landscape in an experimental way with no direct references to the great masters and keeping an internal complicity with them. It's unclassifiable but nowadays, it explores a vital side of our quasi-dark era suddenly highlighted.

Both contemporary and modern? When he collegially evokes the paintings which helped him find his way, he mentions Song's art as well as Sam Francis… Cézanne mentioned Poussin, Roman art and Buddha. According to Chae Sung-Pil, Richard Long or a Tapies did not have the same approach than his! Let's say that these high level matierists made us face these strict frontalités. It is impossible to cross their flatness. It stays matte and bi-dimensional, with no image.”

Pierre Sterckx