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Heeseung Chung
Heeseung Chung, who deals with photography as the main medium of work, considers the reproducibility and limitations of photography. She continues to expand and experiment with the media in the form of books, objects and installations. In 2014, she established a publishing company Hezuk Press along with a graphic designer Yeonju Park—their main publishing project is called ‘Float Series,’ which cultivates collaboration opportunities with diverse visual artists. In this project, she recognizes the book as a close interaction between images and text, structure and materiality. Furthermore, books and printed materials are being explored as important parts of her work.
ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE (2016)
ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE is one of her representative works originally presented in exhibition and photography artist’s book. The book under the same title is separated into three subtitles—‘Tender buttons,’ Rose is a rose is a rose,’ and ‘Disappearance,’ under the subsidiary theme of ‘Three Morceaux on the Impossibility of Meaning.’
‘Tender buttons,’ which borrowed the title from the poem by an American novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, shows objects and bodies in a fluid, interdependent relationship, names attached to it, and objects that form loose relationships. She first started this work when her daughter was going through precocious puberty. Adolescence is a period of perceiving with things that are strange and new, and a process of pain and tears. However, she implies that it is our destiny to pass through the time of suffering well to recognize ourselves as the whole being.
Rose, the main character in Stein’s children’s book The World is Round which introduced on the beginning of ‘Tender Buttons,’ is also a delicate 9-year-old girl crying over about her name. Rose concludes her journey by carving ‘Rose is a Rose is a Rose…’ in a row around the trunk of a tree in an adventure to find her identity. In the following view, a quote from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and her photographic series of roses appear.
The exhibition under the same title held in 2016 was a representation of the previous artist’s book, reconstructed in the context of exhibition. Experiment in the medium that led to the exhibitions from the books are now available online. She refers to short quotes from different sources at each start, implying that successive photographic series are closely linked to one other. The photographic props with separate themes are now connected in circle like the words Rose carved on a tree from the tale, forming a variation to its common theme of ‘the Impossibility of Meaning.’

ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE:
Three Morceaux on the Impossibility of Meaning

1. Tender buttons
2. Rose is a rose is a rose
3. Disappearance

Heeseung Chung

Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around.

Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was. And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell everybody all about it and they wanted to tell all about themselves.

And then there was Rose.

Rose was her name and would she have been Rose if her name had not been Rose. She used to think and then she used to think again.

Would she have been Rose if her name had not been Rose and would she had been Rose if she had been a twin.

Rose was her name all the same and her father’s name was Bob and her mother’s name was Kate and her uncle’s name was William and her aunt’s name was Gloria and her grandmother’s name was Lucy. They all had names and her name was Rose, but would she had been she used to cry about it would she have been Rose if her name had not been Rose.

I tell you this time the world was all round and you could go on it around and around.

From The World is Round by Gertrude Stein

1. Tender buttons
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I smiled.

“Tertius equi,” I said.

“What?” William asked.

“Nothing. I was remembering poor Salvatore. He wanted to perform God knows what magic with that horse, and with his Latin he called him ‘tertius equi.’ Which would be the u.”

“The u?” asked William, who had heard my prattle without paying much attention to it.

“Yes, because in good Latin ‘tertius equi’ doesn’t mean the third horse, but the third of the horse, or the third letter of the word ‘equus,’ which is therefore the u. But this is all nonsense....”

William looked at me, and in the darkness I seemed to see his face transformed. “God bless you, Adso!” he said to me. “Why, of course, suppositio materialis, the discourse is presumed de dicto and not de re.... What a fool I am!”

From The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

2. Rose is a rose is a rose
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But above and beyond there's still one name left over,

And that is the name that you never will guess;

The name that no human research can discover—

But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

His ineffable effable

Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

From The Naming of Cats by T. S. Eliot

3. Disappearance
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