Helen Chung: Don’t Forget to Remind Me to Forget

About

This exhibition of new work by Helen Chung includes work from an ongoing series of paintings Chung began working on in 2019. While the finished works bear little resemblance to the kinds of word and text paintings not uncommon in contemporary art (the word is less the ‘object’, or more accurately ‘objective’ here, than the thought), viewers should not be surprised if letters and words seem to disentangle themselves from the whole, complicating and notionally unravelling the composition. The artist attributes these words and phrases to “apologies to myself” or (less judgmentally) self-counseling precepts she found herself returning to in the wake of a delayed diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) in late 2018. Yet the initial impulse to transform words into images began well before her ADHD diagnosis.