Kwang Young Chun ― Mulberry Mindscapes

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).

John C. Welchman is Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego. He has written for numerous publications including Artforum, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the Economist. His books include Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles, Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity, Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s, and XX to XXI: Essays on Contemporary European Art. He is editor of Rethinking Borders, Institutional Critique and After; The Aesthetics of Risk, Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art, Sculpture and the Vitrine and the collected writings of Mike Kelley (in three volumes to date).

Carter Ratcliff is a leading art critic and contributing editor to Art in America. He has received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Art Critics Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Poets Foundation Grant. His books include Andy Warhol, Gilbert & George, and The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Post-War American Art.