Chae Eun Rhee: alles doet er toe 

Laurie Cluitmans

Curator, Contemporary Art, Centraal Museum Utrecht 

Translated by Beth O'Brien

November 2023

It has already been more than a year since I first visited Chae Eun Rhee in her studio at Buitenplaats Doornburgh. The country estate, used for centuries as a luxurious rural retreat, served as a convent as of 1957. The nuns who settled there had a visionary outlook and invited architect and monk Dom Hans van der Laan to build a supplemental monastic complex. His pupil Jan de Jong ultimately took on the assignment and created a beautiful complex entirely consistent with his mentor's ideas. The transparent, austere architecture is void of any frivolity, yet does have a tactile quality. Although the nuns left in 2016, it remains a calm and quiet environment, which seems to make a visitor walk more slowly, speak more softly. By way of that former convent I entered the world of Chae Eun Rhee. How different things were there. Colorful paintings, crowded with people, created an exuberant and inviting contrast.

In her studio Rhee was working on a new series of paintings, including a commission for the Centraal Museum. Her paintings are a feast for the eyes; there is constantly something to discover, and despite being fragmented and densely populated, they aren't chaotic. My eyes drift around the studio from one story to another, from one detail to the next. The large works consist of parallel scenes that take place simultaneously: scenes from the here and now, but also from a distant past; scenes and details from South Korea; North America and the Netherlands; scenes from pop culture, films, art history and current events. The visual motifs, which she herself calls visual marks or visual stains, are interwoven like a feverish dream. Often two or three scenes play the predominant role, and clever solutions such as architectonic ruins, curtains, or an element such as fire, differentiate the individual stories from each other and create space for the eye to roam along slowly with the action, allowing it to search and read.

Rhee tells me how she grew up in Seoul, in South Korea, where she began, at a young age, to comb through art history books and thus become familiar with painters from previous centuries: Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer. When she went to study painting in Chicago, at the School of the Art Institute, she was suddenly able, via the Art Institute's fantastic collection, to stand 'face to face' with the painters she had previously seen only on paper. Art history continues to be an important source of inspiration for Rhee. A reference to Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas in a painting that appeared in her first exhibition at EenWerk in September 2020, for example, prompted the Centraal Museum to invite her to create a new work for the collection. In the painting, titled Spiegel im Spiegel, that doubting Thomas came to figure prominently. Here, in this characteristic work of hers, Rhee learns and borrows from the old masters. What stands out is not only the art-historical reference, but also the way in which she phrases this reference and manages to translate it into the present. Thomas is poking into the wound of Jesus while flanked by a contemporary of his and a contemporary of ours. The group is surrounded by all sorts of other motifs that allude to fear, such as Hitchcock's film The Birds; several police officers keep watch over a scene. It is typical of the way in which Rhee gives her own twist to such art-historical quotes. They become disengaged from their original contexts but convey their connotations like hints and give a historical dimension to the contemporary composition.

This past October I was once again in Rhee's studio, for a preview of the paintings destined for Anyway the Wind Blows, her second solo show at EenWerk, opening on 11 November. In her earlier work the green and open surroundings of the rural estate had already proved to be essential for a new direction in Rhee's development. Before this she had mainly lived in large cities, Seoul and Chicago. That metropolitan life had influenced her palette and resulted in more greyish hues. Once she began working in Doornburgh, the verdant surroundings seeped into her use of color; and suddenly she could observe a horizon, which emerged in her works along with cloudy Dutch skies. With her new series of paintings she embraces that lush environment even more. Her frequent walks outdoors, during the day but also at night, and the changing of the seasons offer new images and are echoed in her work. When she recently read the book Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) she herself began, like Kya, to collect feathers in her surroundings and to paint images of these. Kya, the young protagonist in this novel by Delia Owens, grows up for the most part alone, in the marshes of North Carolina, and manages to find her own path in life. She spends her days collecting feathers and shells, which she renders in paintings. Although Rhee doesn't refer to the book explicitly in her new paintings, she had been inspired by the way Kya coexists with the overwhelming wilderness described in the book.

In the painting 41 Days and Nights she has depicted, centrally, a woman paddling a canoe which recedes from the viewer as it moves through the water. This isn't simply an outing in a boat; the painting exudes a certain mystery. Are we witnessing a flood? Or in fact the beauty of majestic nature? I try to find clues in the work's details. What has happened? Where are we? The scene shows architecture overrun by water and rampant growth. The window that she paddles toward is a reference to the seventeenth-century windows of the old house on the country estate. The antique glass is bumpy and reflects light in a distorted manner. When painting the window, Rhee took inspiration from the windows of Vermeer in the Rijksmuseum. Strikingly, not all of the surfaces are figurative or developed in a precise way in this work. The curtain to the left, for example, or the roots of the tree that gradually turn into a mass of undefined water, and the painterly orange area, to the right of the boat, which could be a blaze, yet has a sense of logic without definition as well. The woman wearing a raincoat and holding an umbrella evokes memories of earlier works, in which she referred to Hong Kong's 2014 Umbrella Revolution. Perhaps, after all, a hopeful sign?

Hanging here and there in her studio are pages from the book of hours Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, by the Limbourg brothers. The medieval book of hours is famous for its rich embellishments of beautiful miniatures. It contains, among many other things, sermons from the gospel and psalms. And the calendar miniatures which depict, in twelve scenes, the rustic, agrarian labor typically done in each month. These are also linked to the signs of the zodiac and are considered the human response to the divine order of the universe. In various paintings in the studio I begin to discern details from that book of hours. An admonishing angel from purgatory; a group of wild boar looking for acorns in the month of November; a hunting scene with a group of dogs in the month of December. There is a similarity between Rhee's compositions of fragments from narratives and the way in which narratives are depicted in the book of hours: multiple scenes are piled up, as it were, on top of each other. They take place at the same time and jointly portray a story. The big difference is that Rhee's paintings never simply tell one story.

As a present-day history painter she reflects on our times. Not by offering a single perspective – one event, one place, one dominant perspective – but in fact by bringing together fragments and then inviting the viewer to move among events, perspectives and possibilities. As a result there are many recurrent elements in the new series of paintings: Mudras – hand gestures of Buddha – globes, people making globes, geese, falcons, falconry as a sport for taming wild birds, people in motion as a counterweight to inactive staring at a digital world on a screen. The wide world of visual culture comes across in her work in this way: anything from AI-generated faces, pop culture, to art history and news images. It makes up a visual archive that she draws on freely. Those visual stains seem to be everything that Rhee wants to capture, all of the visual phenomena that abound in our lives. Each painting then tells a story. But that is never unambiguous. While the motifs are there, their interpretation is open. That is partly because many of the motifs not only hold symbolic meaning, but also arise from the pleasure of painting, from the painter's curiosity and desire to paint certain images. She wants to seize the energy of those visual marks and preserve it in the enormous abundance of images. Take, for instance, the purple/black stockinged legs. This detail from an old master fascinated her for some time and has now finally – apparently in manner both random and logical – found its place.

In a smaller painting, The Shape of Wind, where hand gestures again play a role, we see birds, feathers and two girls existing alongside and on top of each other in a composition. The two hands are not mudras, but clasped together via the thumb they form two wings. This is the sign for 'bird' in sign language. In recent months Rhee has seen birds outside converge into a swarm, pass by on their way to warmer places; and occasionally she took care of injured ones. It has become part of her daily life, but nevertheless a subtle metaphor too. Migration is a theme that crops up metaphorically in much of her work. Not literally the currents of people, but as a movement heading toward an unknown future. How can we orient ourselves in a visually profuse world filled with great uncertainties? And how did we imagine the future in the past?

Rhee constructs her visually overwhelming paintings very precisely, from fragments, while keeping these questions of life at the back of her mind. The outdoor world continually creeps into her paintings and draws you into them as a viewer. It's the many details that keep you there.