IRENE KUNG
Irene Kung was born in Switzerland and trained as a painter. In recent years she expanded her repertoire to include photography and has achieved international recognition with many exhibitions in New York, London, Milan and more recently in Beijing and Moscow. She has exhibited at the Bozar Museum in Brussels, Belgium, at the Palazzo della Ragione in Milan and in the spectacular surroundings of the Certosa
San Giacomo in Capri, Italy. Her work has appeared in numerous international magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Sette del Corriere della Sera, China Daily and was selected by the international jury at ParisPhoto 2010. She was invited by Contrasto to contribute to EXPO 2015 with a solo
show at the Fruit and Legumes Cluster featuring 26 photographs of fruit trees. The recently published book Trees follows The Invisible City, on architecture photographs, that was published in 2012 in English, Italian, French and Chinese. The essentiality of the shots and the ability to make her subjects emerge from the darkness, in fact, express a stylistic and conceptual proximity to the Italian pictorial Renaissance: her works highlight the rational desire to identify new possible paths for a sustainable future and renewed attention to the balance between human and natural. At the same time, Kung's compositions highlight by contrast the ambiguity of urbanization and human neglect, bringing out a subtle disquiet from beauty. Describing suffering through a refined and dreamlike representation is an attempt to generate a new meaning starting from the perceptions of an emotional experience, it is an abstraction that leads the artist from the darkest areas to the meditative dimension, up to the unconscious spaces of the soul.
