Theresa Chong’s recent etchings, writes Nancy Princenthal, “look like unusually detailed star charts, but the constellations are both denser and fainter than is usual, and their contours suggest recognizable figures only at the furthest imaginative stretch. Moreover, close inspection reveals tiny characters, many of them standard Roman letters, though some are from an invented alphabet loosely based on Korean. Printed in pale yellowish fluorescent ink on ashy black, the images, delicate through they are, have a slightly diabolical glow…. Chong cites additional influences for her prints, including rubbings from Asian text stones. She also notes that the repetition required to play a musical instrument—rehearsing a particular Bach suite, for instance, over and over—has been internalized and transformed in her current work. The hypnotic iterations of Philip Glass’ music are, for similar reasons, another point of reference.”
Theresa Chong’s work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Springfield Museum of Art, OH; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Boston, MA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC; Deloitte & Touche, San Francisco, CA; General Dynamics, Inc., Falls Church, VA; Pfizer, Inc., New York, NY; Progressive Corporation Art Collection, Mayfield Village, OH; and Werner Kramarsky, New York, among others.
© Art Projects International
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