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1 Floating Island - A Horse2. Floating Island - A Camel
Cheong produced some symbolic and edged works in resistance to the turbulent circumstances of South Korea in the 1980s and since the 1990s he has casted a persistent gaze at reality on the basis of his critical, historical conscious while focusing on the issues of history and the times. Besides doing creative work as an artist, Cheong has been a local, artistic activist who participated in 1984 in the establishment and management of sain gallery whose emphasis can be characterized as an alternative space and was Chairperson of the executive committee of the Busan Young Biennale, which is the forerunner of the Busan Biennale. He made a tremendous contribution to the birth and growth of what was called ‘Busan Figurative Art’ of the 1980s, which was a new art style of strong figurativeness through which it was differentiated from Minjung Art.
Floating island ‐ A Horse and Floating island ‐ A Camel shown at this show were made in 1999, and the standstill forms of the two animals that were used also for both transportation and communication reveal the predetermined conditions of nomadic beings wafting within history. Unlike in his other works, here, the multiplex divisions and the color schemes are restrained in these picture planes into which geometric shapes made of cold, metallic materials incorporated so as to let floating reality and the inside of history subtly intersect. Is it by chance that these geometric forms, which resemble the stone pillar or the simplified images of stone fragments overlapping the works of his series work of ancient maps, are located at the regions of the backs of the horse and the camel as if they were those animals’ wing? Cheong’s art tells the conditions of reality and the individual that have to face with the contradictories of the times and histories in a symbolic language that surpass time and space.
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