Chae Eun Rhee’s Cosmopolitan Fever Dreams

A fire, a protesting crowd, Korean pop star ‘V’, an unzipped Fjällräven bag, fragments of paintings by Breughel, Caravaggio and Van Eyck and images of Hitchcock The birds, a character in a dinosaur costume, recurring rainbow patterns … everything swirls in Chae Eun Rhee’s paintings.

The exhibition with paintings by the South Korean artist at the Museum De Fundatie in Zwolle consists of only ten paintings (a triptych), but the multitude of subjects and details on the works often of the size of one meter means that you experience it as a retrospective exhibition of an artist that has lasted for decades – and not by an artist who only recently (2020) completed her residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In addition to his arts education in Seoul, Chae Eun previously studied in Chicago – Asia, Europe and the United States, which explains something of his cosmopolitan frame of reference.

Personal visual language

Decipher those overloaded cryptic paintings, you might say – but there’s no getting around that. The references are so diverse that probably only Chae Eun understands exactly what she is trying to say with them. Because she keeps turning over certain elements in her paintings (the undulating windsocks you associate with car dealerships, the Twister dresses, the fire, fragments of Breughel) speaks her language. Until you try to pronounce what exactly it is, it turns out you don’t have the words for it after all. These are pictures, not a conclusive grammar.

Chae Eun manages to convey a clear mood with his images: his paintings are like a turbulent cosmopolitan fever dream, in which the images are thrown at you like in a bustling metropolis. The stacking of meanings gets an extra layer on A song for the invisible, on which a man seems to drape a canvas over the image, behind him a dancer covers his image with a second canvas. In the middle walks a blindfolded figure, pursued by a paper garland. You can try to guess what it is, but you can also just experience it.

beautiful image rhymes

Chae Eun’s paintings are not chaotic as she narrowly directs your gaze with clever diagonal lines. There are clever forms of rhyming pictures, such as the man standing in a round hoop, which connects to create a perfectly round smiley face more right on the canvas. A son for the invisible II. The curved back of a man who seems to fall on a fallen boy rhymes with the rounded back of a dog in a painting by Breughel. Points like this reveal that these chaotic webs are actually built with precision.

Chae Eun’s images float between space, time and cultures, so that the viewer can find himself in a kind of hyperconsciousness. In this respect, they are perfectly in place here, in the new cloud-shaped building above the neoclassical building of the Foundation: these paintings are like dreamlike images where reality is processed and jostled. The most beautiful thing is to sit and look at these paintings as if you are watching a blockbuster movie, an overwhelming sequence of images – see what it does to you, dream and maybe think of something unrelated but true. , like the words with which in 1976 the first star wars movie announcement: “Somewhere in space all of this can be happening right now. “