God is a Cheeto

For UAA painting professor Thomas Chung, the Divine is more than a pale, white-bearded man caressing fingers with Adam. Rather, a mythic image is a dead and putrid whale carcass. Religious experience is painting the visage of Angelina Jolie pouring a plastic bottle of Coke on a starving Ethiopian child she is breastfeeding, along with a pig. God is a Cheeto.

“I’m hoping for corporate sponsorship one day,” Chung joked in his kitchen/work space in North Anchorage that also looked like a taxidermy studio for a set from a Rob Zombie horror film. “It goes back to my interest for the sacred and profane. I think Cheetos are the most unsacred appearing thing, the most banal, everyday object. How could there possibly be a shred of God or anything mystical or spiritual in a bag of Cheetos? I don’t I know, I believe there is.”

The cheesy snack food makes multiple appearances in his work, including a painting of a raven clutching a single, orange puffed crisp in its beak, which will appear in Chung’s latest exhibition “1F14: That’s not God.”

The title comes from a “Simpson’s” episode where Homer prays to a waffle that Bart threw on the ceiling, and like Homer’s holy breakfast food, his pieces explore encounters with the myriad forms and experiences we describe as God, including the symbols of consumer culture.

“Maybe everything is wearing this mask of consumerism, but it doesn’t take away from the kind of experiences we have as humans,” Chung said. “It’s very easy to believe we would lead such different lives if we lived in pre-contact America or if we lived 500 or 1,000 years ago but I believe, at our very core as human beings, we have remained the same.”

With a background in cultural anthropology, Chung combines symbols from various myths and stories along with contemporary brands like Coke and Jägermeister

“There’s something kind of funny about Jägermeister,” Chung said as he held a rubber circle mat with the deer and cross logo. “He’s that saint who was a hunter and ran into a deer and this glowing, crazy cross appeared and that’s how he found God. Now it’s a coaster.”

During grad school at Yale, Chung received a travel grant to go to the Amazon basin. He wanted to find remote, indigenous peoples as far from the Western world as he could in order to observe what was different between us, and what we had in common.

Chung ended up spending time in Peru with the Shipibo tribe, known for their Ayahuasca, the ingestion of which serves as a religious sacrament. It also induces hallucinations. A Shipibo shaman administered the plant with Chung for two weeks. After several bouts of vomiting, difficulty breathing and the general expectation of imminent death, Chung had a vision: Angelina Jolie’s depiction of Lisa Rowe from the 1995 movie Girl Interrupted. Her character, her archetype calmed him. He felt a sense of strength, courage and wisdom.

“I built my whole dissertation based on this experience,” Chung said. “Had I grown up in this village I would have had a vision of the Star Twins or the Giant Serpent that created everything, but because I grew up in suburban New Jersey the visage that appeared to me was Angelina Jolie in that movie.”

He finds human connection in those eternal feelings imbedded in the elusive forms. The act of creating art, and the finished pieces—which include ceramics, photography and paintings—are for Chung a form of meditation.

“It’s like a prayer,” Chung said. “I don’t really think about it. It just sort of comes. I often don’t even know what any of this means until a while later. It’s all just sort of subconscious, bric-a-brac that comes out.”

A piece that will be on display during Friday’s exhibition is a photograph of Chung crouched next to a rotting whale, his hand resting on its tail.

The image symbolizes a threshold he’s crossed in his personal and artistic life. A new promotion to the head of UAA’s’s painting department— combined with his own work’s success—has given Chung a stability he never thought he’d attain. He likens this success to a kind of White Whale. “What do you do when you catch it?” he asks.

“Looking at this rotted and bloated whale carcass and the kind of tenderness I had toward it; I was really happy to see it even though it was disgusting, I think it really speaks to moving on to different phases of your life and still having a sense of nostalgia for them,” Chung said. “There’s a value in the actual dream even when it’s gone.”

Fellow Yale alumnus Thomas Betthauser’s work, exploring similar themes, will also be on display. His work includes photography and digital projections.