MIMI JUNG

Pale Blue Ellipse and White Rectangle, 2019

mohair, cotton, aluminum sheet + aluminum frame

38 x 53 x 2 inches

sold

INQUIRE

Mimi Jung alters the language of thread in a way that invites questions about the relationship of the geometric confines of weaving to formal vocabularies of abstract painting. Her work expands notions about the construction of pictorial abstraction to include the process of making and tactile experience. It is an understatement to say that Jung’s work successfully frees itself of the decorative character of textiles or the assumptions of what a woven work should be. Engaging the optics of painting, and the tactility and physicality of sculpture, the work is conceived of and exists in the vocabularies of contemporary art disciplines.

Surface texture is a palpable medium in Jung’s work. The delicate featheriness of mohair used in the weft tempers the work’s strong physicality. It is an active, seducing quality. Tactility is as expressive in Jung’s work as form and color, and as in Pink to Black Rectangles, the softness of the surface, paired with scale and palette, at once creates an immersive plane that also comes forth to envelope the viewer.

Here Jung isolates the individual strands of the warp, inserting space between, lending the allusion of beams of light radiating between clouds, or in the case of Blush to Tan Ellipse, from the sun itself. The density of form against void, amplified by the surface’s pilosity, confuses the two-dimensionality of the woven plane, inviting a figure/ground division. The voids also lend a sculptural physicality, influencing and engaging the space around, through, and behind the work. The way in which Jung limns space prompts a reconsideration of the woven plane as screen or sculpture, and by exposing the inner structure of the work to affect light, Jung even touches upon architecture.