Danese

Danese is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by Theresa Chong. The exhibition includes two video projections, a new area of exploration for the artist, and a group of intricate gouache and pencil drawings on handmade Japanese rice paper. The drawings, either black imagery on an off-white ground, or white on deep blue-black, consist of delicate meandering lines punctuated by minute painted elements which convey a sense of rhythm, meter and lyric beauty. While open to multiple associations and varied interpretation – celestial maps, cascading particles on a field, even musical notation – the work remains fundamentally and purely abstract.

Chong’s videos extend and transform her drawings into animations of sound and movement. In 4' 33’’, a title that refers to John Cage’s famous piano piece of the same name, white dots, and eventually clusters of dots, suddenly become visible against a black ground, their appearance synchronized to percussive bursts like the clatter of hail on a tin roof. When the screen becomes an opaque concentration of dots, a cello begins playing an etude…and the dots softly and slowly begin to fall, like snow. Chong's drawings and animations evoke ephemerality, the appearance and disappearance of things in time. ¹

Theresa Chong was born in Korea in 1965 and immigrated with her family to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1974. She attended Oberlin Conservatory, Ohio and the Boston University School of Fine Arts. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, among others. Chong participated in the faculty residency program at the Anderson Ranch in Colorado in 2003 and 2005. She was recently awarded a grant from the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, and she has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts). Theresa Chong lives and works in New York.