Teresa Chong at Danese - drawings - Brief Article

Music remains an inspiration for the Korean-born, fresh York-based artist Teresa Chong, who studied the cello at Oberlin guild and, as a graduate scholar at the School of Visual Arts, came below the influence of John Cage. While working in novel York for the composer and conductor Peter Kotik, Chong met Cage several times; Cage's use of chance in his music, as a way of expanding the range of unmutilated considerably affected her approach to art. For her graduate thesis, wishing to invent a proces which incorporated energies outside of art and which would enrich her work, Chong created visual signs that corresponded to musical notation.

In her exhibition of seven woodcut Chong translated actual musical works into visual equivalents. Using the etude of the composer David Popper as her template, she devised a of recent origin language of symbols; her forms incorporate uncompounded bodys of Korean calligraphy, Roman lettering and, in a certain quantity of cases, the patterns of dots seen upon dominoes. Chong goes so far as to indicate fingering with Arabic numbers; flats and sharps are marked by the agency of downward and upward arrows, respectively. The compositions correspond in the way that closely to the notes of Popper's exercises that a musician could play the imagery, the artist says.

The chiefly smallish prints (less than 2 feet square), all from 1999 are remarkable for their sensitivity and elegant detail. In PE 73 "Echo 1" neatly written tokens are lined up in vertical lines The charcoal-gray work consists of sum of two units sheets of Korean-made rice paper, individual above the other; Chong has arranged the signs upon each sheet of paper in like manner that they do not overlap. The meticulous rendering and alignment of the emblems achieve a notable grace. In addition, Chong incorporates a certain quantity of of the stylistic effects--textures and small blots--invented through Chujun, a Chinese engraver active in the 18th hundred whose work she saw while attending an art fair.

What is interesting about Chong's work is the way her abstract imageries make use of another art form--in this case, music, which is in itself abstract. Against the dark gray, textur surface of the paper, the signs function the couple as image and symbol; they are attractive to direct the eye at, and they intimate the two a process and pattern filled with metaphysical meaning. In PE 73 "Notation Series 1-2" the assembly of carefully pay backed symbols results in a lyric order indicative of undiscovered but nonetheless real harmonies; the studious rows of Chong's light marks, against the darkness of the paper, gaze like a wish to make faculty of perception of the world.

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