Creating Understandings: The Art and Life of David Chung

Personal experiences have provided some of the deepest wells of inspiration and exploration for artists and designers throughout history — and Stamps professor David Chung is no exception.

Before Chung was an award winning, internationally exhibiting visual artist and filmmaker, he nurtured his creative talents from a mini-mart that he managed in the Washington, D.C. area, where he lived in the back office, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. His father owned the small business, along with many others in the D.C. area. 

“In that job, you have to open up very early and close very late, so you’re there all the time,” Chung says. ​“I felt a huge obligation to help my family, so I felt fine doing this.”

Prior to his time at the family business, Chung worked as a motion graphics artist and animator for film and television in New York, building up enough contacts to allow him to freelance from the mini-mart office in his scarce downtime.

“Eventually, after I graduated from school, I started to sell my work more, and that really helped financially,” he says.

In the late eighties and early nineties, Chung’s art career took off through exhibitions, commissions, and representation at Gallery K in D.C., allowing him to move out of the mini-mart and create a life funded by his creative pursuits.

“I keep telling students that it’s possible to make a living doing this — but it’s hard, it’s not easy,” Chung says. ​“I think that with commitment and hard work you can get there.”

While Chung’s rising success changed his daily life — leading to museum exhibitions, residencies, and eventually his faculty appointment at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design in 2004 — his time at the family business left him with first-hand experiences, questions, and emotional terrain that would influence his work for a lifetime.

Histories and Context

The son of a Korean foreign service member, Chung was born in Germany and lived all over the globe with his family during his childhood, including residences in Seoul, Korea; Nairobi, Kenya; London, England; Tunis, Tunisia; and New York City before his time in Washington, D.C.

From 1976 to 1990, the Korean diaspora represented the largest group of immigrants to move to the U.S., with many Koreans fleeing their homeland due to the political insecurities, high unemployment, and military dictatorship that followed the Korean War. In this period, many recently arrived families started corner stores, carryout restaurants, and other small businesses in historically Black neighborhoods. By the nineties, tensions between Black neighbors and Korean shop owners ran high as language barriers and cultural differences created misunderstandings.

Black community members reported feeling a lack of investment from Korean shop owners who largely didn’t hire from the Black community and were perceived as participating in racial profiling. Many Korean merchants were encountering the nuances of racial dynamics for the first time while trying to adapt to a new country and language.

“A lot of the shops had bulletproof glass. The shopkeepers were behind the glass and the customers were in front. This dynamic further challenged community relationships on a daily basis,” Chung says.

Over time, animosity between the two groups led to protests against Asian storeowners on the East coast. Then, in 1992, violence broke out in the L.A. Riots, one of worst urban disturbances in recent history. Over six days, hundreds of shops and businesses were destroyed.

While the community outrage expressed in the L.A. Riots was sparked by the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers for use of excessive force in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a Black man pulled over for speeding on the expressway, a larger anger at inequitable systems of oppression fueled the fire. In the heat of the moment, Korean-owned businesses in historically Black neighborhoods were often targeted. Reports from the time note that the riots caused approximately $1 billion in damage, about half of which was sustained by Korean-owned businesses.

Inviting Change

Chung rose to the many cross-cultural challenges of the late eighties and early nineties with compassion and an instinct to create space for healing. When the D.C. mayor’s office formed the Afro-Asian Relations Council in an attempt to ease racial tensions between Black and Korean communities in the city, Chung was tapped as a founding member.

“We did things like cultural awareness building and police training, because we realized that the police were often young recruits who were on the scene. They were the first people to come to the scene if there was a dispute between a customer and a merchant, and they often knew nothing about what was going on. We had meetings and speak-outs with community people to talk about these issues,” Chung says.

In addition to community organizing, Chung’s allowed his experiences with cross-cultural tensions to inform his creative work.

“People in the Black neighborhoods didn’t know who all these Asian people were. I wanted to tell stories about who these Korean merchants were, how they came to be there, what their lives were like, and why they were there,” Chung says.

Seoul House

In an effort to explore racialized relationships between Black neighbors and Korean shop owners, Chung collaborated with composers Pooh Johnston and Charles Tobermann to create Seoul House, an electronic rap opera, initially staged in 1988 for two nights only at the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C., with subsequent performances at Williams College Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, University of California Berkeley, and Wellesley College.

Chung’s charcoal mural-scale drawings were a core component of Seoul House. ​“I was attracted to working in charcoal because of its mark-making qualities that captured the drawing in motion,” Chung says. ​“Even though it is considered a preliminary medium, I liked its fugitive characteristics. Drawing using charcoal and oil stick is very unforgiving, the first marks you make stay on the paper. There is no erasing, it’s sort of a document of what you’re thinking when you’re drawing. As far as the scale, some of these drawings are wall-sized, and some are room-size works. I liked the cinematic immersive elements of the large-scale works. I wanted the viewer to feel as though they were entering the artwork.”

Chung also created traditional Korean masks that served as central costume elements for the opera’s performers. The masks were designed by Chung and made in collaboration with Kurt Kiefer, an artist who’d mastered a form of papier-mâché that used ultra-fine paper pulp for a smooth finish.

“I saw the masks as a great opportunity to reinterpret this old traditional theater form into a contemporary performance,” Chung says. ​“Plus, the music was pre-recorded and played and most of the characters – all but one – did not sing live, so worked well with the full-coverage masks.”

In 2025, two of the masks from Seoul House were acquired by the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) for Korean Art, on view through January 25, 2026. The exhibition features work from 1392 to today and places Chung’s masks beside mid-20^th century Korean dance masks known as ​“tal” and broadly used in various Korean performance traditions.

“I hope visitors see both the continuity and evolution of socio-cultural storytelling,” says Jiyeon Kim, Ph.D., Curator of Korean Art and Culture at PEM. ​“The juxtaposition reveals thematic and visual parallels in their use of satire, distortion, and exaggeration, while highlighting the personal dimension of Chung’s work, drawn from his own immigrant experience.”

Turtle Boat Head

In 1992, Chung was commissioned by Thelma Golden, then curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, to create a new drawing and video installation that further examined the urban immigrant experience. The title, Turtle Boat Head, refers to one of the most important moments in Korean history when, in 1592, Admiral Yi-Sun-sin defeated the invading Japanese armada by designing ironclad warships in the image of huge fire-breathing turtles.

In a subsequent exhibition program, Kim Davenport, former Director of the Rice University Gallery of Art, noted, ​“The ships appear in wall-size charcoal murals in which Chung’s taut, angular figures and careening perspectives forcefully convey an immigrant’s experience of the turmoil and isolation of American urban life. Chung combines these drawings with other media to create an environment that he says is like ​‘a walk through the mind of a young Korean person.’ In Chung’s poignant vision the sense of personal and interior space is starkly contrasted with the world of external events. Entering a structure representing a typical inner-city convenience store, viewers are given a moving glimpse into the daydream-world of the storekeeper, who grew up in Korea. This element of Turtle Boat Head, a large screen video projection, has been recognized as a significant work in itself, winning numerous awards at video festivals across the country.” 

Archive Donations

Nearly 40 years into his career, Chung was sorting through the materials, research, correspondence, financial statements, and notes that had amassed through countless projects, collaborations, exhibitions, and screenings. He was about to start throwing things away to clear storage space in his studio when he was contacted by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, with an invitation for Chung to donate this ephemera to their collection. 

“Chung participated in seminal Asian American art exhibitions and created ground-breaking multi-media artworks, installations, and performances. Researchers who are eager to explore these underrepresented but impactful moments in American history will be able to learn from the perspective of an artist who was at its center,” says Christina Ayson-Plan, Archivist and Curator of Asian and Asian American Art Histories, Smithsonian Archives of American Art. 

Chung hopes that the inclusion of his ephemera in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art will work to address what he calls the ​“digital gap,” the time period of the eighties and nineties when digital media and the internet was new enough that first-person accounts and other grassroots storytelling around major events is not readily available, leaving only archives from mainstream broadcast and print media reporting.

“A lot of students come to me and say, ​‘have you heard of the L.A. Riots?’ It’s new to them. There are a lot of gaps in the narratives around those times,” Chung says. ​“Hopefully the presence of my ephemera in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art will help to preserve important stories and fill in those gaps.”

Story by Truly Render.