Unity

Gracefully swimming fish, symbolizing wealth, abundance, and union, have remained a popular motif in East Asian painting and decorative art for millennia. Young Yang Chung received the commission for this piece after the Korean War in the 1960s from the South Korean government, which at the time sought to express its desire for the unification of Korean peoples through the visual arts. Chung chose to depict a school of fish to express the idea of togetherness. The weeds the fish are swimming through are stitched in the outline technique leaving the tails as part of the pattern. Each element of the feathery water weed is composed of a series of outline stitches, or a variation of the outline stitch, in which wispy “tails” are created for a realistic effect. Non-glossy polyester is used as the base fabric to allow the fish to stand out. As the polyester culture was popular in the 1960s, this work also represents the trend of the time.