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Mulberry Mindscapes

Skira Rizzoli

May 13, 2014

The first monograph on Korean artist Kwang Young Chun, renowned for exquisite handmade mulberry paper sculptures and textured surfaces that represent harmony and conflict in the unity of many. Covering the entirety of Kwang Young Chun’s career from his early abstract paintings to his famed Aggregation series—complex structures and canvases created from the antique, handmade mulberry paper pages of literary and academic texts and tinted with teas, fruits and flowers—this book documents a highly influential contemporary artist whose work, writes the New York Times, “…makes you sense something fundamental about great art that is too often forgotten or overlooked in today’s age of instant everything….”

The use of traditional materials and organic dyes, and his meticulous process, imbues Chun’s compositions with a timeless quality that has been recognised around the world. In 2001 Chun received the artist of the year award from the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. His works are included in esteemed public collections such as the United Nations and Rockefeller Foundation in New York, the National Gallery of Australia at Canberra, and were recently exhibited in a three-man show with Anselm Kiefer and Gotthard Graubner at the Kunstwerk museum in Eberdingen-Nussdorf, Germany (2012).

The book includes such special features as a gatefold, tinted pages, and a jacket printed on hanji, traditional handmade Korean mulberry paper.