'New Works: Sunyong Chung'
Austin Museum of Art – Downtown through August 15

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
June 25, 2010

In a summer darkened by the calamity in the Gulf of Mexico and by catastrophic storms in the East and fires in the West, one doesn't expect to see heaven and earth poised in harmony.

And yet, in a room of the Downtown galleries of the Austin Museum of Art, there they are, these contrasting aspects of nature in rare and beauteous balance, as embodied in two sculptures by Austin artist Sunyong Chung and exhibited as part of the museum's ongoing "New Works" series.

With the work One Year, we are squarely earthbound. The massive ring, nine feet in diameter, sits low to the ground, about the height of a bench, and its massive solidity and weight contribute to the impression of it being rooted there, an outcropping of the planetary crust. Porcelain tiles cover its surface, inside and outside the ring, depicting a progression of the seasons, with representative images of the natural world in each portion of the year: mountains blanketed in snow, trees luxuriant with new green foliage, pale blue waters, ripe cherries ready for harvest. Chung has covered the structure with dozens and dozens of tiles, and the images on them are both large and small, so that a stroll around the sculpture yields delights in the discoveries of her tributes to nature: a sequence of a setting sun (or is it rising?), the smiling skull of a toothy predator, silhouetted birds winging their way across a lilac patch of sky. Indeed, the vantage point of most viewers will be that of a bird, or perhaps a deity, high above the earth where all the beauties of the earth in its cycle of life can be observed. And Chung's depiction is so captivating that one is tempted to keep walking and go through that cycle of life and rebirth again and again and again.

Tearing oneself away from the earth leads, however, to a reward in heaven. The companion sculpture to One Year is as much of air as its fellow is of earth. The Dance is an 8-foot vortex of paper and string suspended from the ceiling so that it hovers above the floor. To be fair, Chung's inspiration for the piece, as revealed in the printed pamphlet produced for the exhibition, owes more to cellular spirals and twirling dancers. To my eye, though, the structure suggests those spectacular, churning towers of clouds sometimes seen during serious storms. The circular layers of crimped white paper – imagine a levitating stack of giant Elizabethan collars – are as light as One Year's tiles are heavy and, with the ample spaces between them, suggest the insubstantiality of those snowy sky dwellers. And though it's clearly hanging there by strings, because the air generated by your own motion around it will cause the piece to move, it feels more like it's floating.

As with One Year, you're drawn to circle The Dance, and each turn brings happy discoveries. In this case, Chung has inserted into each of its layers elaborate little paper sculptures: cones within cones within cones, like a nesting doll of miniature twisters; platelike circles punched with so many holes as to resemble lace doilies; banners shredded almost to the fineness of hair; delicate cut-out figures that call to mind silhouetted paramecia. In this white-on-white structure, some are camouflaged like white rabbits on snow, and seeing them requires more than a casual look. But then, peering in is part of the pleasure of the piece; you become like one of those pilots flying a small plane into the eye of a hurricane, to spy that which is hidden so high above the earth. And part of what you spy here is a monumental steel corkscrew spiraling through all that paper, the metal spine on which all this airiness is hung. This weighty bar is startlingly incongruous in the midst of so much lightness, and yet it also seems to belong here, like the booming thunderbolt that lives inside the feathery cloud.

In leaving Chung's sculptures through the galleries currently filled with digital images by Chris Jordan, you're confronted with staggering levels of consumption by the human race and its deleterious impact on the environment. Seeing them after seeing One Year and The Dance adds to our appreciation of what we're losing through this rampant waste. Through these two ambitious and exquisitely crafted works, Chung has given us a glimpse of nature unravaged by man, of heaven and earth in balance, in harmony. Not Eden or Paradise, just the world as it should be.

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'Our Hands on Each Other'
Exploring feminism, 'queerness' leads artist to 'womyn's lands' in Mississippi

By Clare Croft
Austin American-Statesman
June 26, 2010

Leah DeVun asks lots of questions when she talks about her artwork: Who is a woman? Who is a feminist? Who is queer?

Who would have thought questions about these fraught terms would best be explored in rural Mississippi? DeVun did.

Over the past year the visual artist and historian explored questions about feminism and queerness - an umbrella term DeVun uses to reference a range of sexual identities including gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex people - through two spaces where women formed communities.

First, she learned the history of local gallery Women and Their Work. Then, she documented rural spaces in Mississippi called "womyn's lands" by their feminist, mostly lesbian, inhabitants.

The result, the exhibition "Our Hands on Each Other," runs at Women and Their Work through July 15. The exhibit includes photographs of womyn's lands and young queer women, a collection of feminist magazines and lightboxes featuring images of the women's movement.

Mainstream culture often ridicules radical feminists. As a history professor at Texas A&M University, DeVun says she constantly sees misperceptions about feminism among her students. DeVun defines feminism as "wanting women to be able to achieve and exist in all the ways men do," but students often shirk from the term.

DeVun says visiting womyn's lands was part of dispelling stereotypes of feminists.

"The women I met were incredibly open-minded," she says. "Some people want to reform society from the inside, and some people think society's so corrupt you have to scratch it and start over."

The lands' locations and their inhabitants' identities remain private, so the women do not fear intrusion from outsiders. DeVun's large, color-saturated photographs record communal spaces on womyn's lands, like community kitchens, but no women appear in the photographs.

DeVun hopes the women's absence allows viewers to imagine their bodies in the stark, lovely landscapes.

Lisa Moore, UT professor and author of the forthcoming book "Sister Acts: Lesbian Genres and the Erotic Landscape," says DeVun continues a long history of female artists exploring lesbian desire through artistic renderings of women in nature.

At 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Women and Their Work gallery, Moore leads a panel discussion titled "A Brief History of Queer Space," about DeVun and other female artists, ranging from 18th-century women who crafted elaborate gardens in the shape of women's bodies to Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings of flowers resembling women's genitalia.

Women's bodies play a larger role in the exhibit's portraits. In all the portraits, a woman, often partially nude, sits tall, looking directly at her audience.

The women's stance stems from DeVun's experience working as a model in New York.

"Years ago a photographer told me, `Don't look right in the camera, because men don't like it when women look at them out of advertising,'" she says. "I wanted to see women who were larger than the frames - spilling out of the composition - with their gaze coming out of the photographs."

The part of the exhibit focused on feminist magazines features an array of titles like "Country Women," "Dyke" and "Womanspirit." Visitors can also read an issue - an opportunity DeVun offered to illustrate overlaps with current feminist blog and zine culture.

The connections among past and present movements were important to DeVun.

She says meeting older lesbians on the womyn's lands was a way to imagine her own future - an act she says can be difficult for young queer people facing an onslaught of images of heterosexual life, but few images of aging queer people.

"Meeting these women was a positive experience," says DeVun. "The womyn's lands are so alive and full of interesting people and interesting ideas."

Moore says the exhibit's vitality comes from insisting that womyn's lands are not only ideas and places of the past.

"There might be a tendency to see these communities as of the '70s and '80s, but in fact this is a tradition that often reinvents itself without realizing what came before," says Moore. "It's the wishful thinking of mainstream culture that this was too radical to last."

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