PRESS RELEASE
BIOGRAPHY
Karam Cheong, known by the artist name Karam.
A deep desire to create art at a young age led me to NY, where upon completion of BFA in Communication Design in Parsons School of Design, I started my career as a graphic designer. A few years later, I decided to quit my successful career in order to pursue my passion for fine arts which had captured my interest since my childhood. My experience as a graphic designer assisted me in finding better ways to combine colors and composing spaces to create art. I believe that art creation is an unconscious process in which intuition is drawn to the fingertips of an artist to convey the deepest emotions inside the artist onto the canvas. My art was created by expressing my perception of the world by combining the philosophy of creation and reform with the reality of compromise. I hope that the works created in this way will be expressed by the conflicting relationships of light and shadow, movement and rest on the same surface, so that viewers can have another fun in my works.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Changing the values and mindsets accumulated in childhood despite a long period of overseas stay requires considerable effort and patience. Of course, I wanted to change it, so I tried it and mistakenly thought that I changed myself. However, I learned that things piled up one by one never change easily. However, I had a meeting about whether I should change this effort and time. Instead, I decided to accept my Korean roots and express my thoughts as they are.
My works are based on minimal art, but the expression method preserves the remnants of time and effort in each work, and tells each story vividly like living and breathing. At the command of my fingertips, strands of different lengths and shapes intertwined and overlapped, expressing changes in time and space and thoughts in a simple and dense manner. In particular, surfaces with small and diverse spaces create each unique shadow as they are exposed to light, and the vitality that changes with the movement of light gives the painting another dimension. I try to approach an infinite and mysterious "space of uncertainty" through shadows created by the overlapping space between layers and each strand.