Artist Intention 

– Coexistence of nature and mankind.. Return to memories -

• The artist intended on expressing bits and pieces of his/her memories of lyrical landscapes, which resemble beautiful movie scenes, based on the artist’s childhood memories through surface paintings. Until now, the artist’s main work had focused on collage using solids (objets) on canvas paper using the topic of Korean beauty. 

• At the start of each early summer, deep in the mountains, when acacia flowers are in full bloom and mulberry trees are filled with mulberries, the artist’s mother would grow silkworms in a mud-walled room. The silkworm would struggle over an extensive period of time to produce thin and fine silk thread. Throughout the night, the sound of it crunching on mulberry leaves would resonate beautifully, perfectly resembling the sound of raindrops. 

• Nature and mankind.... The life of coexistence locks up and ties oneself in the realm of fate in which solitude and patience overlap to the extent that he or she is viewed with awe, similar to a monk practicing asceticism. The reuniting and parting of a relationship during the times.. The artist’s life, which speaks about longing, shares a thread of connection with the cocoon.

• During that beautiful summer, the artist deeply longed to express the lily-white cocoons as a topic of art. With the passage of time, the artist now desires to express his/her work in the elegant form of sculptures and paintings. The beautiful memories of nature and the artworks reborn with his/her artistic values now sing of the longing for n

Artwork Description – Formative language that shares surface and solid structures

• Until now, the artist had mainly worked on collage using form boards, expressing Moon Jars on canvas paper on the topic of Korean beauty. The artist’s recent works portrayed memories on longing for the disappearing nature, and his/her mother and hometown. 

• The artist used an actual cocoon as an objet to enhance the depth of the authenticity of the work. The collage work involved deep thinking into the type of the sculpture, with the form‘s repetitive composition aligning both horizontally and vertically, and the borrowing of a subtopic surrounding the frame’s exterior aimed to expand the spatial composition range of the surface through extension with a single color. ature and memories that continue to fade away.

• Such mixed usage of the topic and subtopic aimed to show order and stable differentiation, and the usage of ink work and a monochrome single color implies the meaning of a monk practicing asceticism while looking deep into the walls of self-control and introspection.

• Furthermore, the experimental attempt to unleash unrestricted freedom from form or art materials aimed to further inquire into the diversity of modern art.

Art Critic for Cheon Hyontae's Artwork

Rediscovering Korean Aesthetics: The Sculptural Poetics of Time and Emptiness

Ahn Hyun-jung (Art Critic, Ph.D. in Aesthetics, Chief Curator at Sungkyunkwan University Museum)

Cheon Hyeontae’s work transcends mere form-making. It is a contemplative act—an artistic ritual that weaves strands of memory, material, and time into tactile visual poetry. By collapsing the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and reinterpreting traditional Korean motifs such as the moon jar and the silk cocoon, Chun constructs an aesthetic language deeply rooted in both Eastern philosophy and contemporary sensibility. “Art is emotion; it is the artist’s diary,” Chun once remarked. This statement reflects not a romantic indulgence, but a disciplined, Eastern approach to making—art as a method of self-cultivation, or suyang. His practice emerges at the intersection of memory and material, wherein the cocoon becomes a metaphor for time spun from the body, and the jar a vessel for poetic emptiness.

Cheon Hyeontae is not merely preserving Korean heritage through art; he is reimagining it. By making memory material, by turning silence into structure, he exemplifies how traditional aesthetics can evolve without rupture. His works are diaries not of self, but of shared time—wound in thread, shaped in clay, suspended in space. In a world inundated by noise and speed, Chun’s art offers stillness. His practice is an act of sculptural listening—where time is not kept but touched, and memory not stored but reborn. The Korean aesthetic lives anew in the tension of form and void, in the friction between tradition and its deconstruction. Through thread, vessel, and void, Cheon Hyeontae spins his quiet revolution—one filament at a time.

The Thread of Time: Sculpting Memory

Chun’s acclaimed series The Time of Memoryexplores the existential interplay of past, present, and the body's trace. Here, the cocoon is not merely a biological object, but an active agent of remembrance. Like the philosopher Henri Bergson suggested in Matter and Memory, memory is not storage—it is creative duration. In Chun’s hands, cocoons become sculptural filaments that entwine forgotten time with sensory renewal. His method—physically brushing, scraping, and unraveling layers of cocoons collaged onto canvas—is laborious and meditative. It is not simply making, but a process of “scraping time,” of distilling the intangible into tactile form. Each cocoon thread bears the residue of a vanished moment, materializing memory through repetition and refinement. This process mirrors the Buddhist practice of suhaeng, where repetition becomes a pathway to the dissolution of the self. Chun’s act of drawing out silk is akin to transcribing the sutras of sensation—a quiet scripture of touch, loss, and return. His recollection of hearing silkworms munching on mulberry leaves—"like the sound of rain in the quiet night"—captures the poetic potential of ordinary sensory memories.

The Aesthetics of the Empty Jar: Reimagining Form

Chun’s Moon Jarseries, inspired by the archetypal Joseon white porcelain, is not a nostalgic reproduction but a radical deconstruction. Where the traditional moon jar epitomized purity, balance, and restraint, Chun’s reinterpretations challenge the ideal by engaging in visual disassembly. His jars are not filled with substance but lined with questions: What must be emptied? What does one carry? Through delicate reliefs of cocoons and brushed textures over foam board, he breaks the jar’s symmetry and remolds it into an emotional vessel. These transformed forms invoke the spirit of Korean dansaeghwa(monochrome painting), where surface simplicity belies spiritual depth. Chun’s muted palettes and textured surfaces suggest that silence is not the absence of content, but the presence of becoming. Emptiness (gong), in his work, is not void but fertile space—a site where breath, wind, and memory gather. His jars become not static objects but living shapes, vibrating with the pulse of time and the fragility of recollection.

Beyond Dualities: Korean Beauty Rewritten

By integrating sculpture and painting, presence and absence, abstraction and figuration, Chun’s oeuvre resonates with the dynamism of contemporary Korean-hwa(Korean painting). His work does not rely on traditional ink techniques but extends the lineage of Korean aesthetics into the realm of material experimentation. The convergence of cocoon-thread textures, collage, and sculptural relief echoes the hybridization that defines much of postmodern Korean art. Yet, unlike many contemporaries, Chun maintains a profoundly philosophical grounding—his surfaces are meditative rather than merely expressive. The moon jar, often romanticized as a symbol of Joseon’s artistic philosophy, is here neither fetishized nor simply modernized. Chun’s jars are not containers for things but for time. They hold air, pause, and the undulating trace of a hand. They invite not usage but contemplation. His question—“What contains me, and what must I empty?”—is not rhetorical, but sculpted into form, stitched into thread, and embedded into surface.

Time as Material, Art as Practice

Martin Heidegger wrote that human existence is a being-toward-time: the past lives in us as memory, and we are always projecting into the future. Chun’s work visualizes this ontology. His threads are not decorative; they are temporal bridges. His cocoons are not inert; they are gestural memories. The Time of Memoryseries resists linear temporality, inviting cyclical, layered reflections. Time becomes tangible—an object to hold, unthread, and feel. His art is thus not simply an aesthetic practice but a metaphysical one. As in the Daoist principle of zhuo wang(sitting in forgetfulness), the self is effaced so that the world may emerge. The jar is no longer an artifact, but a breathing form. The cocoon is no longer a container of life, but life itself unfolding into visibility.