ACROSS DISTANCE

Chae Roh’s work stands out for the way it reveals a new path of thinking process on the questions of identity that many young artists confront today. In contemporary art, identity is frequently addressed as a subject matter, foregrounding specific personal experiences, often traumatic, and collapsing them into fragmentary, polarized languages that generate social tension and division—contributing to modes in which art is publicly and politically consumed. Noh deliberately sidesteps this trajectory, courageously situating her process of self-understanding within myth, a narrative structure shared across human history.

In recent years, identity politics has assumed a central position within contemporary art. Questions of gender, race, minority experience, and decolonization have drawn long-marginalized voices and lived realities into institutional space, allowing art to engage more directly with social conditions. Yet as this tendency has become increasingly institutionalized, it has also come to function, at times, as a prerequisite for legitimizing artworks. What is most at stake here is how the human subject is understood and represented—both within artistic practice and from without. To apprehend an individual primarily through a single identity may appear to offer a radical mode of understanding, but it ultimately results in a reductive view of the individual whose existence unfolds across a complex, irreducible spectrum. Because the concept of an identity is fundamentally constructed within political discourse, the individual is easily positioned as a case fixed within predetermined coordinates, narrowing the scope of how we think about and understand them.

Roh’s work suggests that the process of coming to know oneself is not a matter of defining or categorizing the self, but of learning to see it as an open narrative—one that, like myth, is repeatedly transformed and never closed. This is not a rejection of political positions, but rather an attempt to approach the human condition from a humanistic perspective, in a register that political language cannot fully reach.

By choosing a path toward the broader perspective of identity, Roh relocates her position within myth as a shared narrative structure and asks anew about her personal relationship to the world. Notably, she adopts temporal, spatial, and psychological distance as a methodology. Born in Korea and trained in design at Parsons School of Design in New York, Western culture inevitably remains, for her, something at a remove. After returning to Seoul following the pandemic, she purposefully chose East Asian painting—a genre that many young Koreans now feel emotionally distant from. She then uses the materials of East Asian painting to depict Western myths, refusing to settle into the potentially safe yet unfamiliar shelter of what is called tradition. Within this layered distance, she develops her own subject matters, color schemes, and narrative/visual structures. In this process, painting functions less as a mode of representation than as a site of trial and reflection; it becomes not a vehicle for delivering narrative, but afield in which questions remain open.

In this sense, Chae Roh’s work is not narrative painting so much as reflective painting. The “narrative” in her paintings does not unfold as a linear story with a clear beginning and end, but rather as an attitude shaped by the affective and metaphorical power of myth, and by the point at which fiction intersects with reality. Beginning from a distance, almost alien gaze upon Western mythological icons and narratives, as well as the materials and physicality of East Asian painting, she gradually finds a point of immersionwhere these elements overlap. At this intersection, pastoral landscapes reminiscent of Puvis de Chavannes, mythic figures such as birds and hybrids, clumsycalligraphic gestures rooted in Korean aesthetics, and materials including bunchae(traditional Korean paint), hanji(mulberry paper), and ceramic stucco converge to form a new painterly language. Within this space, Chae Roh continues to grow—not as a subject shaped by misunderstanding or political assertion, but as an individual expansive, free, and quietly luminous.

Mimi Park