NEW YORK.-From September 14 to September 21, 2005, internationally acclaimed artist Jheon Soocheon launches The Moving Drawing of Jheon Soocheon: The Line That Crosses America, a remarkable work of art executed by and aboard a chartered passenger train, enlivening the vast transcontinental panorama of the United States as never before. Jheon regards the project as an immense, participatory installation embracing visual arts, nature, and technology. Through its realization, he broadens the idea of what constitutes a work of art.

For eight days, the American landscape serves as canvas and the train, wrapped in white fabric, becomes the artist's brush. Once in motion, the train will metaphorically draw an elongated line with its white-wrapped, moving rail cars from New York City to Los Angeles, following a scenic route with stops along the way at Washington, D.C., Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and Albuquerque (for a full list of scheduled stops please visit www.movingdrawing.com). Covered in its chrysalis of white, the train becomes a metaphor for the artist's brush as it performs this immense drawing through the country's heartland to the American West. The project is being curated by Shim Chung, the New York-based curator who is known for Special Effects: New Media Art in Daejeon Museum in Korea, an exhibition she helped organize with Lawrence Rinder and Jungu Park in 2002, and who currently works as an international exhibition commissioner for FAST (Future for Art, Science and Technology) at Daejeon Museum in the fall of 2005.

En route, Jheon will host programs offered by experts in art, culture and the environment. Open to the participation of the public, the experience will be broadcast via satellite and Internet to allow audiences everywhere to participate in the work's creation. The moving train thus becomes a means of global communication.

RaillCruise America, located in Saint Louis, is supplying the 14-car train for the realization of Jheon's project. It is also the only Amtrak-certified, privately owned train in North America.

The Moving Drawing is Jheon Soocheon's latest participatory project as he continues to explore the interaction of people and the environment. According to project's curator Shim Chung, the artist regards the white color of the train as a symbol of the unlimited potential of creativity. The white will be altered by the nature of the train's passage through the environment, marked by the elements en route.

Jheon considers the train an aesthetic device blurring the distinction between artist and audience. It can be traced to his earlier work, an experimental drawing in wood and fabric on the Han River on the first anniversary of the Seoul Olympic Games in 1989. The work was originally considered for an installation on the East River in New York City. In 2007, Jheon will create a site-specific installation in the Arizona desert entitled Wol-In-Chon-Gang-Ji-Gok ("one thousand images of the moon mirrored over water"), which will be projected onto 365 television monitors.

In 1995, Jheon was honored at the 46th Venice Biennale, and the following year participated in the 23rd Sž£o Paulo Biennial. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in New York, Seoul, Budapest, and Tokyo. Born in Korea in 1947, Jheon was educated at Musashino Art College in Tokyo and received an MFA from Pratt Institute, New York.

Symposium - On September 15, the artist will inaugurate the first symposium on board between Washington, D.C. and Chicago. The symposium will feature some of the most prominent creative minds in the world. The symposium accompanies Jheon's drawing as the exploration of various aspects of modern life and creativity, with focus on the role of art and technology in a global age. According to Jheon, "What's much-needed in today's highly industrialized society is to get impetus to escape from the rule of a restrictive system. The train symposium whose objective is to develop a new world of thoughts, is for the practice of such discussions."

The first session will feature W.J.T. Mitchell. Mitchell is a Professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. The second session will feature French intellectual Guy Sorman, professor at the prestigious Paris university Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris.