Jiyoung Chung

Today is Tuesday, September 8th

Hello everyone! Today we are excited to spotlight an artist based in our home of Providence, Rhode Island. Jiyoung Chung is an artist bringing fresh vision to the ancient Korean papermaking technique of joomchi. The process is labor intensive and takes several hours of continuous motion to complete, during which the paper fibers are “agitated” in a ball of dampened strips, which is passed from hand to hand and increasingly interwoven as the ball moves. The final form is a thick sheet of paper. Chung says that though her process is extremely repetitive, she finds it enjoyable more than boring. It is “an essential dialogue with the material,” a process of negotiating with the fibers, and with life. Chung says that the softening of the paper with agitation is much like the way life becomes easier the more it is dealt with. “I’m not dealing with the paper,” says Chung of her work, “but with the process of creating”. 

Chung initially received her training from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002 with a degree in painting, and later earned an MFA in print/media in 2005 from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It is her foundational strength as a painter, says Maria Tulokas, professor emeritus of textiles at RISD, that makes her work so distinctive. You can read more about Jiyoung Chung’s work in the articleWater, a Table, and Eager Hands, by Pam Thomas, a writer and editor in Rhode Island, and Chung her speak about her work in a video on the joomchi papermaking process here.