GERMANY: Exhibition Nordheim - Talstraße 31/1 - Nordheimer Scheune - Der Traum des Papageis - JUNGIN HWANG

Exhibition: „Der Traum des Papageis“ – JUNGIN HWANG

From 15th February till 29th March 2025 the fascinating artworks of JUNGIN HWANG could be admired in the exhibition “Der Traum des Papageis. Malerei, Zeichnungen” in the NORDHEIMER SCHEUNE. The title would mean in English „The parrot’s dream. Paintings, drawings“. In this article here you will see several of here interesting creations from the solo exhibition in Nordheim, which is a beautiful village located between the cities Heilbronn and Stuttgart.

Curator HELMUT ALBERT MÜLLER about the exhibition: Each of us dreams at night. Everyone dreams differently. Most of us have daydreams and lucid dreams from time to time and some can even control their lucid dreams. But only a few, like Jungin Hwang, who was born in Seoul in 1992, continue to dream in their paintings and drawings and visualize them in such a way that they still know years later what they dreamed and what they once meant to them. A year ago, Jungin Hwang dreamed that she was a hybrid being and her mother an elf. She was six years old and was approaching puberty. During this time of transition, she turned into another and grew pointed ears. A plant grew on her right hand, which grew bigger and bigger. She was bullied by the other children at school. A psychiatrist advised her to have an operation. In a painful operation, the plant was removed from the surface of her hand with a square incision.

After a year, the plant grew again. I am neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, so I cannot and will not engage in interpretations of this dream along the lines of Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysts such as Wilhelm Reich or body psychotherapists such as Alexander Lowen, but will firstly introduce you briefly and concisely to Hwang’s approach to painting. In the second part, we will present some of her works, drawing attention to her dreamlike notion of the transformation of humans into animals and plants, and in the third part, we will discuss her proximity to the idea of „deep incarnation“, the profound entry of God into the flesh.

How does Jungin Hwang go about painting and what does painting mean to her? Her painting gives Hwang the opportunity to encounter her own body, her figure, her self and her surreal dream world in a narrative way. When painting, she begins with watercolor backgrounds and then arranges her composition into an organic whole that oscillates between figuration and abstraction. Even though she uses bright colors, they do not have symbolic connotations. Eight years ago, she once considered working only in black and white, but then decided against it because she found a colorful pictorial world more complex, contradictory and humorous. In her paintings on canvas she works in oil, in her drawings on paper mainly with gouache. Abstractions give her the opportunity to better express her dreams. When she joined Franz Ackermann’s class at the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe in 2017, she had already completed preliminary studies at a Korean art college and a private art college.

In her painting „To look like a commoner“ from 2024, Hwang presents us with a familiar situation: She is standing in front of a crosswalk. A car is coming from the other side. She raises her hand to indicate that she wants to walk. A traffic light shows red, yellow and green at the same time. This leaves it unclear who is allowed to walk or drive. As in almost all her works, she sees herself embodied in the pedestrian, driver and car. She is both a car – even the car has eyes! – and pedestrian at the same time. And she probably also sees herself incarnated in the traffic lights.

In her follow-up work „The Parrot’s Dream“ from the same year, she begins with a dark background because the parrot also dreams at night. The supporting figure was supposed to be simpler than in the previous work. And she succeeds. She is now reduced to a head, a stylized upper body with three breasts and a dominant foot. A green ray shoots out of the mouth and separates the top and bottom. A parrot sits on the ray. Blue trousers hang downwards. An upper body grows out of them. The dark green head with the two eyes in the top left corner next to the parrot is borrowed from the Japanese film „My Neighbor Totoro“ from 1988, in which two sisters encounter nature spirits in a neighboring forest. Hwang is again present in all the figures, in the parrot, in Totoro, in the overhanging upper body and also in the midnight blue of the right edge.

In „Curtain Call“ from 2024, the protagonists step onto the stage between two neon yellow curtains like actors before the final applause and transform into monsters and monsters. In „Self-Portrait“ from 2021, Hwang shows himself as both a seated and standing figure with four legs. This painting also has the character of an exercise: it has helped her to handle her brushstrokes more freely. In the drawings „The Butcher’s Shop“ from 2023 in the living room to the left of the painting „The Parrot’s Dream“ and „The Butcher’s Shop in the Forest“ from 2023 on the staircase to the left of the front door, customers can be seen with pieces of meat hanging from the ceiling. One of the pieces of meat could be a person. Torture chambers from the Nazi era, Dietrich Bonhoeffer before his murder and the Abu Ghuraib torture scandal during the occupation of Iraq by the United States come to mind, but also 1 Peter 1:24 and its parallels: „All flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower has fallen, but the word of the Lord remains forever“. I pursue the motif further and come across the beginning of the Gospel of John: „In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us“ (John 1:1 ff.) and the film „Animalia“ by Thomas Cailley from the year 2023.

After the French science fiction film „Animalia“ premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, the first mutations from human to animal appeared on Earth. Two years later, society has adapted to the development that affects men and women. „I knew it!“ Says the young woman with a smile as she strokes her lover’s naked back for the first time. His whole body is about to change. What she doesn’t know is that he has had to cut his claws for a long time, and they are now regularly sticking out from under his fingernails. Is it a virus? Or what is causing this new pandemic, in the course of which people are more or less rapidly turning into animals?“ (Inge Kirsner, Of humans and other animals. In Practical Theology 4, 2024, p. 255). According to theologian Inge Kirsner, the film represents the animal turn that has been developing in cultural studies since the 1990s.

In theology, too, where the understanding of what man is has developed for centuries in contrast to the animal, efforts are being made in times of the coming post-Anthropocene, i.e. the coming age in which man is no longer the master of all things and the measure of the world, to find a new relationship to oneself and the environment. One starting point is the „deep incarnation“ coming from the American region. The starting point is John 1:14: „And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us“. In Greek, „logos“ stands for the Word – logos can also be translated as wisdom – and „sarx“ stands for flesh. „Sarx“ goes back to the Hebrew „kol-basar“, „all flesh“. There, „all flesh“ refers to humans and animals. If you interpret it this way, God not only became human, but also incarnated in all of creation.

In „Animalia“, too, the boundaries between humans and animals are broken down and new things are created when people are transformed into bears, geckos, frogs, birds or a wolf and find a place of refuge in the middle of the forest, where wolves live with lambs and panthers lie with goats, as the prophet Isaiah says (see Isaiah 11, 6 ff.). If not only Trump’s mega-decrees, „Make America great again“ come from America, but also the memory of the kingdom of peace announced by Isaiah, and if Jungin Hwang, like God incarnating in immanence, can at least see herself in her dreams and in her paintings and drawings in everyone else and in things, there is still hope, hope for a better time. – Curator Helmut Albert Müller