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    Lavinia
    T-YONG CHUNG

    Open Studio _ Fonderia Artistica Battaglia
    Via Stilicone 10, Milan
    March 10 – March 23, 2017

    Opere

    T-yong Chung’s perception and personal experience of Italy is that of a cultural, iconographic and humanistic atlas from which he draws  inebriated inspirations and thoughts.
    He wanders freely, and he is curious,  attentive and attracted by some fundamentals which one can easily discover in his artworks: Classical Art, Arte Povera, Minimalism. Undoubtedly, his works transcend a continuous dialogue between past and present.
    Sculptor by tradition (his father is a sculptor in South Korea), he grew up in workshops  and foundries. He then went on to study at the University of Seoul and then at the Brera Academy in Milan, and there he decided to settle down in Italy.
    His works portray the tension between the fullness of western culture and the essentiality of oriental culture. This creates a formal balance which is difficult to add to or take away from.  His sculptures  are defined although they seem unfinished and his mark is delicate yet vigorous.
    Often incorporating leftover materials, antique chairs, rusty tools, sheet metals, he dismantles, reassembles, smooths, polishes  the remnant  until it takes on a new identity , but still strongly linked to   its dignified past.
    His most recent works start with  plaster reproductions of classical busts and concrete models of everyday objects.
    He has recently started to approach  the portrait subject, focusing his research more on a real person than on a symbol. Here the classical approach is always present, but a sort of contemporary humanism seems to prevail.

    Lavinia is T-Yong Chung’s most recent project to be held at Fonderia Battaglia in Milan, in its Open Studio program.
    Produced by Tender to Art, Tender Capital’s visual arts hub, the project will be installed and inaugurated at Fonderia Battaglia, Thursday, March 9, from 6 pm to 9 pm.
    The focus of the installation will be T-yong Chung’s first work, which is a bronze sculpture of a young girls bust classically and figuratively molded, which the Korean artist has reinterpreted based on his usual technique to decontextualize a western iconographic symbol, through incisions and surface polishing.
     
    For T-yong Chung Lavinia, Latinus and Amata’s daughter, Aeneas’s second wife, portrayed as a child, represents Mediterranean femininity, the purity and the complexity of a woman figure.
    Lavinia is an installation through which the shaping of a bronze bust using different materials and colors (plaster, clay, colored wax), are absorbed by the young face portrayed during the process itself. The result is an identifiable process of a cycle that repeats itself.
     
    The object is characterized by what it shields and tells; it finds a new vitality in its estranged aesthetics. T-yong Chung moves through prominent symbolisms and familiar characters, arranging them  in a new order, dictated by his sensitivity which sways between two profoundly different cultures.
     
    T-yong Chung (Tae-gu, South Korea, 1977) lives and works in Milan. In 2016, he participated in the ACAW, Field Meeting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Asia Society, New York and in the Gangjeong Contemporary Art Festival, The ARC, Tae-gu (South Korea). His works have been exhibited at the Lissone Museo d’arte contemporanea, Nuovo Spazio Espostivio of Casso as part of the Dolomiti Contemporanee festival,  Fondazione Spinola Banna of Torino, as well as the Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea of Trento. The artist also held solo exhibitions at Otto Zoo gallery, Milan, MARS, Milan and the Car Project Gallery, Bologna. He has additionally participated in various residencies and workshops in Italy, including at the Museo Carlo Zauli of Faenza, at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice and Madeinfinlandia in Pergine Valdarno.

    Tendercapital is an international asset management company, based in London and operating in various European cities.
    Tendercapital’s philosophy and approach to finance finds its complement and its highest expression in an apparently distant world, the Arts, which are not  seen as mere sponsorship propositions  but  as a reciprocation of life concepts such as inspiration, creativity, commitment and anti-conformism. It is an “exchange of life energies” between a financial institution and artists.
    TenderToArt was born in 2011; the project  aims to  be  an  exchange of  ideas and  opportunities  between  Tendercapital and  various exponents of the artistic languages, an exchange based on the common foundation  of dynamism and energy and the will to build together new tomorrows and new horizons.
     
    OPEN STUDIO
    The Fonderia Artistica Battaglia Open Studio program offers artists the possibility to work in its studio, supported by its artisans, to follow the production of a bronze prototype. At the end of the residency program every project will be presented in the gallery space of the historical building of Via Stilicone, in Milan.