SUNROOM

Junghae Park has emerged as one of the most closely followed young Korean painters, participating in such notable exhibitions as Back to square one (SeMA Bunker, Seoul, 2022), Layers and Spaces (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, 2017). She takes elements derived from ordinary objects such as ribbons and colored paper to devise a set of personal visual symbols which are deployed to create colorful geometric abstractions that retain traces of their figurative origins. Since his first solo show Exit, Exit (Art Space HYEONG / Shift, Seoul, 2019), Sikyung Sung continues to explore a distinctive visual language arising from the movement of the brush, by turns aleatory and improvisational as well as intentional. For this show he has created works animated by the interplay of regular patterns with intuitive lines and strokes, inspired by the notion of light and shadow within the structure of a glass sunroom.

Where Park and Sung delve into the fundamental properties of painting, Sujin Choi and Jieun Oh portray moments of everyday life that demonstrate painting’s capacity to convey inner states through ordinary objects and scenes. Since earning significant recognition starting in her mid-twenties, Sujin Choi has been included in notable exhibitions such as Humorland & Co. (Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, 2021), and The Adventure of Korean Contemporary Painting: I Will Go All By Myself (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Cheongju, 2019). Though based on photographs from her walks and travels, Choi’s painted scenes assume the quality of fables, fusing reality, memory, and imagination. Her works for this exhibition shows sunlit interiors where the mundane blurs into the fantastical, arousing a synesthetic response transcending the painted surface. By comparison, Jieun Oh’s paintings appear as a record of some specific experienced reality. In recent exhibitions such as Anti-Romance (Eulji Arts Center, Seoul, 2022) and Illegible Map (Art Space 3, Seoul, 2021), Oh has shown figurative works that imbue the grammar of traditional still life with a distinctly personal vocabulary of expressionistic palette and objects laden with private significance.

Unusual among her cohort, Yun-young Jeong was initially trained in traditional Buddhist painting. This is reflected in her method, which is infused with the techniques and materials of Eastern painting, though distinctly contemporary in her sensibility. On canvases layered with fragments of silk fabric, she conveys the cyclical nature of life in translucent washes and soft stains of vibrant colors evocative of botanical and other proliferating organic forms. Jeong’s recent exhibitions include Incompleted Parts (Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwangju-si, Korea, 2021), and Layered Shadow (Park Soo Keun Museum of Art, Yanggu, Korea, 2021).