Chung jin-sung: Keeping images in place.
Lee, Yeon-sook (Rita)

While a series usually refers to a group of works with a single title (or theme), Chung 's Titled series has no similarity between the works except that they have a title. Titles such as Hill, 十, Love, Moon, and Death establish a linguistic equivalence with the simple shapes of the signs on the canvas, cutting off any room for further 'interpretation'. The reason why he has been insisting on ‘untitled’ works instead of titles is to "eliminate linguistic interference with the artwork”. The phrase "linguistic interference with the artwork" implies the idea that the artwork (image) and language (text) can be separated, and that the latter is ‘interfered’ with or infringed upon by the former.

In short, imagine a scene in which an artist is asked to give a (friendly, even) 'explanation' of his artwork-image: the (public) audience has the artwork-image in front of them that the artist wanted them to see, but they want to hear in words what he wanted to 'express'. Of course, the audience may be more curious about his 'voice' or 'attitude' than his words themselves, but at this point, the artist must translate or 'adapt' his primary mode of expression, the artwork-image, into a secondary mode of expression, the words. The work-image needs to be tamed so that it can become a useful 'meaning' within the context of the utterance. Chung writes that these situations, "every day and social situations" in which "visual modes of expression" that exist "separately" and "on a par with verbal modes of expression" are required to be "reinterpreted as verbal expressions," are “uncomfortable”. The fixation on this situation leads to an acknowledgment that the image can be reduced to language without leaving any surplus, and therefore that the image can only be absorbed by language.

Just as Derrida writes that the ancient metaphysical philosophers regarded the written word as the supplement for the voice, so too, in modern literalism, the image is often regarded as the supplement for language. The concrete, singular materiality of the image is simply captured in a word, a sentence, in the semantic system of language. This is the point at which Chung becomes more than "uncomfortable" but "rebellious" as a (former) designer and artist. Why should the image integrate into language of its own accord? For Chung jin-sung, artist is therefore someone who stubbornly refuses to compromise with language and maintains the ‘meaningless’ place of the image. Instead of representing a specific object or 'expressing' a specific theme, he merely repeats and persists in the attitude that "what you see is what you see" (Frank Stella). From this perspective, the Titled series should be understood as a kind of art historical comment and performance that shows the (artist's) will and attitude against the image-language hierarchy.

The 'manifesto' and (artistic) experimentation through the series Titled can be seen as a reference point within the lineage of modernist painting (abstract expressionism) on the one hand, and post-modernist (conceptual art) endeavors on the other. The former emphasizes the materiality of the elements that make up a painting - color and surface - and rejects the narrative (story) and representation (object) that is often expected of painting. The latter erases the 'author(artist)' and 'title(meaning)' from the art itself and puts the 'myth' of the artwork's singularity (originality) to the test. The image-language (or narrative) confrontation has always been a contentious one, not only in art history but also in film history. Some early film critics went so far as to say that scenes that could be repeated verbally could never provide an ‘authentic’ cinematic experience. This is because images, like language, are structured, and cinema is a medium that ‘only’ submits to the logic and form of images, which is different from language. This is something that those who call for the emancipation of the image from language, including Chung jin-sung, must recognize.