2013 Catalogue Archive

Korean-born Theresa Chong’s delicate web of lines and squares owe as much to the visual language of a music score as they do to Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Chong applies a faint pencil grid to a sheet of handmade Japanese echizen gampi paper, and then uses gouache to lay out the scatter of squares. The result is a dense work that implies, like a piece of sheet music, some underlying language of symbols used to organize information. To the uninitiated, however, the marks become simply an abstract field that encourages the eye to drift among its tightly controlled balance of order and chaos. Chong’s work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Boston, among others.