ARTCOM CENTER

The Ecology of Thought: Organic Paintings and the Sociology of Interpolarity

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In the age of ecological crisis and fractured civilizations, the paintings of Joung Chang ki arrive as both balm and provocation, gestures that summon us back into relation with the living tissue of the world. His brush, steeped in calligraphy and tempered by silence, does not merely lay pigment on canvas. It cultivates thought as one cultivates a field, with patience, discipline, and a willingness to be transformed by the seasons of the earth.

 

His exhibition A New Horizon in Korean Contemporary Art unfolds not as spectacle but as ritual ecology. Here, yin–yang cosmology, and the meditative emptiness of traditional Korean landscape painting are not ornamental citations of heritage. They are organic architectures of being, reinterpreted in the language of contemporary abstraction. Joung’s canvases pulse with vibrant Korean colors yet breathe with Western expressionist intensity, harmonizing cultural codes that were once opposed. This is the reconstructive interpolarity of his practice, the recognition that life thrives not in purity but in the fertile crossing of difference.

 

From the sociological perspective, Joung’s work resonates with the idea of ecological civilization, a horizon in which culture, politics, and nature are no longer imagined as discrete realms but interwoven strands of the same web. His paintings are not illustrations of this philosophy. They are performances of relationality. When his calligraphy brush dances across a field of layered pigments, the movement is not private. It is a public act of world-making, an invitation to the audience to inhabit a cosmos where void and form, East and West, tradition and innovation no longer clash but converse.

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Albert Tang