The trade routes that linked distant civilizations along the silk road were paved in peril. Only caravans of enterprising merchants, soldiers, and bandits were brave enough to travel the sprawling deserts and grasslands between Europe and Asia, discovering cities such as Samarkand, Xi’an, and Kashgar, whose vowel-rich titles rise and fall in sharp syllables like the spires of their towers. Yet, it wasn’t only merchants and conquering armies who found providence within the walls of these fortified cities—but also ideas, philosophies, and art.

Korean-born painter Chae Tongyull understands this history well. He has spent his whole adult life tracing the footsteps of nomadic people throughout Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, carving out trails in some of the most remote and dangerous areas of the world. Yet, unlike the ancient marauders and merchants of old, Chae’s pursuit is not for fortune or gold, it’s for artistic inspiration. At each new juncture on his voyage—a thatched hut deep in the Yucatan jungle, a cheap church-loft in the most dangerous neighborhood of 1980s New York, a makeshift shelter at the highest peaks of the windy Himalayas—he maintains an eye not for detail, but for humanity, attempting not just to observe, but to embed himself in the local community. However, if one wishes to fully scale the breadth of humanity’s most beautiful peaks, one is also duty-bound to descend into the shadows of her deepest and darkest valleys.

Trial by Fire

Chae—whose given name is Choi—was born in the midst of the Korean War in 1950, a descendant of political nobility dating back over three to six generations. As such, great things were expected of him from a young age, and at age 17, he volunteered for the war in Vietnam with ambitions to eventually become an ambassador. It was here that Chae’s boyhood romantic notions of war shattered, forcing him to confront the dark duality, and grim reality, of what it means to be human. “I saw civilians getting killed, I saw everything,” he says. “And at the same time you are learning that you, yourself, are also capable of doing bad. We each have the ability to do really great things, and really horrible things, but you have everything in yourself at once, you are capable of both. I learned that early on.” This experience would awaken within Chae the artist he was destined to become, and forge his brushstrokes with the visceral, nearly primal, energy, one that’s most noticeable in his Slaughter series of the 1980s, which depicts body parts strewn across his canvas.

In Search of New Lands

Following the war, Chae moved to the United States where, as an exchange student, he found an interest in literature The rambling, chaotic prose of James Joyce and the Imagist poetry of Ezra Pound comforted him, giving Chae inspiration for his own creative journey. However, his disdain for the rigid structure of the classroom eventually led him to drop out. He spent the next few years bouncing from city to city across America, working various odd jobs. He became a bartender in New York, a bouncer in Miami, and even a karate instructor before eventually settling in New Orleans. It was there, in an atmosphere humid with Jazz and sticky with syncopated rhythms, that Chae’s bohemian heart found its artistic beat. He met his wife and fellow artist, LD Lawrence, and even started an art movement dubbed “The Idists.” New Orleans became a fresh schoolyard for the young artist, a place where he could discover his voice and flesh out his newfound interest in painting.

From Goya to Picasso, Chae’s color palette draws from the sensibilities of European fine art while his brash brushstrokes harken back to early elements of Eastern calligraphy, particularly the work of eccentric eighteenth-century Chinese artist Pa-Ta-Shan-Jen. With each new place he visits, each new book he reads, and each new idea he encounters, disparate symbols are introduced, transformed, and incorporated into his work.

“Many of the early Renaissance paintings come from Persian paintings, which in turn were influenced by the Mongols,” he says. “They came and ruled over the Arabic countries, bringing all these Chinese painters and their distinct styles. So in a way, my works travel down from the Himalayas and into the tradition of the Renaissance. Although they may look like Western paintings, they are actually steeped in the silk-road painting tradition.” Just as Chae continuously travelled and gained new experiences, these recurring motifs would interweave and refine themselves into a distinctive style that eventually earned him a reputation in New York City’s booming art market.

Quest for Glory

Following New Orleans, Chae and his wife roadtripped across North America in their van through much of the 1970s, a longing for freedom leading them from the steamy jungles of Yucatan to the sunny beaches of Baja and back again. Since they never kept a permanent residence, tracing their exact route is impossible except through the annotations and stylistic tendencies of Chae’s work, whose written records of dates and locations on the back of canvas lend a treasure-map-like quality to tracking their journey. As time went on, their van filled with paintings, until eventually they began to look for a place to unload them. After the owner of a bookstore in Mexico City suggested the East Village, they knew what they had to do. Chae recounts this experience fondly. “My wife and I looked at each other and said, ‘Jesus Christ, all the way down in Mexico City they know about the East Village! We better go check it out.” So they packed their van headed to New York City, nearly 2,600 miles away.

The glittering skyscrapers of New York in the 1980s were symbols of immeasurable wealth, but the cracked sidewalks and graffiti-littered streets below revealed the grim reality of life lived within the city’s shadows. It was a place populated by drug pushers, prowled by crooks, and forcibly occupied by young artists looking for their big break. Chae had found his home. “At that time, I moved into the most dangerous area in New York. It was a Jewish synagogue surrounded by so many burnt out buildings.” Chae recalls. But as a war veteran, he was accustomed to living in less-than-hospitable environments. He claims, “Still though, even though the windows were all broken and the winter was so cold, I had the mezzanine all to myself. It was a good place to start painting after Mexico.”

During this time, Chae thrived as an artist. He shared his flat with graffiti sensation Futura, rubbed elbows with Andy Warhol, exchanged words with Jean-Michel Basquiat once or twice at punk-rock concerts, and exhibited his work alongside urban artists Crash and Daze—whom he still talks to today, nearly 40 years later. Yet, despite these connections, his work was largely separate from the greater youth movement taking place within the East Village. Instead of re-appropriating pop imagery or making grandiose critiques about contemporary consumer culture like that of his peers, he found inspiration from an entirely different source: the Middle Ages.

Chae’s breakout exhibition in 1986, Medieval Tales, was a love letter to the lore of centuries past and a test of his artistic ability to convey his passion for literature on canvas. Harnessing his brush like a sword and referencing everything from Arthurian legends to the writings of magical realists Italo Calvino and Anthony Burgess, Chae had emerged as a direct contender against the “edgy” art styles that had become trendy in the East Village of the 1980s. Like characters in a play, the subjects of this series—kings, queens, jesters, knights—seem to appear as apparitions amidst a shifting background that is intentionally flattened in the style of the Middle Ages. By ignoring the conventions of perspective and emphasis on realism that developed during the Renaissance, Chae succeeds in creating a tension that magnifies the subject of his work and casts the canvas as an isolated realm where science and reason have not yet solidified. The theatrically rendered protagonists that inhabit this world are not “real” in the physical sense, nor do they pretend to be. They are steeped in symbolism, existing only through our collective folklore, imagination, and artistic interpretations. Although separated by time and distance, Medieval Tales succeeded in bringing the fantasy of these far-away places and to life, and through the use of exaggeration, Chae leaves the mystery of these magical worlds intact, urging his audience to dive a little deeper, and travel a little farther, to find their own truths in his art.

A Hero’s Homecoming, and Farewell

Following the success of Medieval Tales, Chae returned home to Korea after nearly 15 years There, his works were bought up by museums and collectors across the country, which gave him sufficient means to embark on new adventures—such as raising his infant daughter, Isolde. Yet, it wasn’t long before he was back on the road again. This time though, at nearly 50 years old, he was ready to embark on his lifelong dream to hike through the Himalayas and down the silk road, a journey that has always held a profound influence on his imagination and art.

These travels have culminated in the series Himalaya, Silk Road, and Interior Still Life, in which Chae’s art style began to noticeably soften, even as his resolve to travel to greater heights, both physically and artistically, began to harden. His skills haven’t decreased with age in the least bit; they’ve only become more focused as he’s gotten older. Whether its in a damp cave below a Hindu temple or at heights of over 4000 meters high in the Himalayas, at each new destination along the silk road—Urumqi, Zanskar, Kanchenjunga—Chae chose to stay for two to three months at a time to live among the locals and paint. “My wife jokes that I’m an extreme plein-air painter,” he laughs. “But I do it to try and capture real life and feel how those people live. I want to become the same as them, without me being an outsider.”

Communion with Nature

Being exposed to the harsh elements of Mother Nature led Chae to reevaluate our relationship with the natural world. “A lot of people think of nature as nice and pleasant, especially the Chinese traditional way of thinking, but nature is very rough,” Chae says. “Nature is heartless. It doesn’t care what we think.” 

Even so, the landscapes within his Himalaya and Silk Road series are picturesque portraits of the scenery he’s come across, the lines and contours of the earth treated with the same Fauvist fervor of a nude female painting, sensuous and warm, but ultimately out of reach. In this regard, the accented peaks and valleys we observe are actually a reflection of our own rosy-eyed romanticism regarding our environment, a notion further enhanced by the vibrant flowers found in the corner of his frames that evoke the tradition of still-life paintings in Europe.

Yet, ironically, our view is often blocked by the near spotlight intensity of Chae’s female subjects, who emerge, porcelain-white and statue-like, as out-of-place characters in his outdoor settings. Modeled off a sculpture of the Hindu goddess Parvati that he encountered while exploring Delhi, these women are naked and exposed to the elements, yet unaffected by their circumstances, indifferent to the male gaze. In fact, Chae claims, “The male gaze is not there at all, maybe not even invited.”

For centuries, the Western tradition of female nudes, landscapes, and still-lifes were treated as subjects of adoration to be conquered by artists and consumed by critics, but by literally turning their backs on us to enjoy the natural scenery on their own terms, Chae’s nude portraits subvert the male gaze and reinforce the indifference of Mother Nature toward humanity. In this regard, perhaps the flowers in the corner of his frames can be viewed more as tributes to her power rather than gifts to win her heart.

Opening New Routes

In his later travels, Chae transformed the impulsive brushstrokes of his early years into something approaching an elegant fugue. The inclusion of flowers, nudity, and landscapes in his art was an intentional pivot, one that allowed him to frame the focus of his art within the basic pillars of Western composition while acknowledging the inspiration and lineage of landscape painting’s evolution in an Eastern, traditional sense along the silk road. “I really grew up in between two cultures.” Chae says. “I studied Eastern literature when I was young, and then lived in America, and now I’m trying to reconnect with the East again.”

Now, at 70 years old, Chae is well-versed and well-travelled, but far from weary. He is the CEO of his own art agency, and like any experienced merchant, uses the countless points of contacts he’s accumulated across the globe to organize exhibitions for old friends throughout Asia. For the 17 year boy who once harbored ambitions of becoming an ambassador, Chae seems to have succeeded. “Now in many ways, all these artists from New York, their dealers, their galleries, regard me as their ambassador to Asia,” he says. “And I take it seriously.” Likewise, as a veteran in more ways than one, Chae is confident that his latest ventures in China will be successful in not only opening up new markets, but exposing a wider audience to fresh artistic ideas. “I want to put myself in the middle, as a sort of conduit. That’s what the silk road was all about. From Asia all the way to Rome and back, and witnessing how all the art had influenced and changed the globe.

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Contributors: Rorí Mencin
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li