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Born in South Korea, the artist Sunjin Chang came to Germany in 1982 after studying art in Seoul, and went on to study painting at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Since then, Sunjin Chang has continually developed and reinvented her work. She lives and works in Essen.

In 2022 the artist created 150 works on paper.

These works – the smallest measuring 25 x 35 cm, the largest 65 x 50 cm – which the artist herself calls “pictures of the soul”, reach back to the beginnings of her oeuvre: to her abstract paintings of the early 1980s and the works on paper from her student years in Frankfurt.

In her mixed-media technique, Chang brings together the practices of her painting so far, handling material and colour more freely than in the works of previous years.

On dark cardboard in landscape format, the viewer encounters, in her characteristically strong palette, luminous, abstract-organic forms like scenes from in-between worlds and dreamworlds. Fields of colour seem to overlap on different planes and merge into moments that rise mystically out of the mist – moments in which flowers appear, high mountains brace themselves against the sea, or birds move through snowy landscapes. Where one seems to sense figures, they are more aura than person, more memory than substance.

We see reduced forms, egg-shaped structures, delicate and coarse strokes, or concentrations reminiscent of spinning tops. The expressive colour, as if from a single cast, finely balances the relationships between the different actions within the picture.

These pictures seem to be about relationships in the broadest sense, worked out in forms, surfaces, colours and lines. What appears central is less a compositional will than an attempt to lay bare something inward.

This may also be why the background is mostly kept dark – far from the customary white ground – so that the colours, set against a darker ground, unfold their full suggestive, inward effect. The hesitant, almost questioning lines and strokes likewise appear reduced and sensitive, pointing to that wordless realm of art in which only intuitive understanding matters, far removed from any preconceived knowledge.

While the paintings of 2006–2019 are clearly shaped by figurative landscape subjects – which Chang painted, among other things, on large rolled canvas panoramas of considerable size (160 x 1000 cm) – the narrative of her painting has now returned to abstraction and to the small format of her early years.

In contrast to her more figurative, large-format panoramas, the focus is now on colour itself: no longer bound to figure or landscape, and less hesitantly tentative than at the beginning of her career. Rather, colour appears as “itself”, as pure material.

In 2022 Chang creates a new composition of her early work, with greater presence and free of all traditions and conventions, while at the same time drawing, in an abstract way, on the formal language she had already used in her landscape paintings.

In an animistic way, these late works engage poetically with the transcendental, moving through undefined spaces between “this world and the next”, and reveal the mature work of an artist who has always sought to shape the worlds of her old and her new home into a new, third space of her own.

Those who engage with these works may find similar resonances in their own soul – resonances that the artist, reflecting on her life, has committed to paper in a deeply internalised way.

Asked how she looks back on her work so far, Chang says: “Life is a little funny, artists are sad … You need imagination!”

“Sun Jin Chang, an artist from Korea who has worked in Germany for many years and has studied both the European and the Asian pictorial traditions in depth, brings the two together in her work in an aesthetically incomparable way.

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In her work everything happens at once; past, present and future are made visible simultaneously. Sun Jin Chang’s paintings thus have parameters that could be called realistic, yet are used surreally. In this way her pictures make visible the continuity of relationships that outlast space and time.

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Sun Jin Chang’s works convey an atmospheric participation in a person’s life while reflecting on the search for identity of those who wander between cultures.”

“Through various techniques (oil, Plexiglas), the Korean artist Sun Jin Chang searches for a synthesis between the cultures of the West and the Far East. Despite Western influences, she remains true to the subjects of Eastern tradition. Her idea is based on the philosophy of Confucius, which rests on the unity, the harmony of humankind with nature. This fundamental attitude runs through her works like a common thread.

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Through energetic, unbroken brushwork and repetition, Sun Jin Chang creates expressive compositions whose rhythm lends them a sacred quality.

One recognises in the paintings the resolve of the calligraphic style. “A brushstroke must be executed with complete determination: there is no going back. It is like life.”

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In this way she develops her drawing style further, combining it with the technique of oil painting.

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With her new technique and the expression of her paintings, Sun Jin Chang contradicts the idyllic values of the Far Eastern painting tradition and thereby establishes an artistic position of her own.”