South Korea, b. 1989

The works of Hyunsun Jeon (b. 1989) use a distinct palette including greens and blues associated with Korean painting. Executed in watercolor, Jeon’s paintings focus both on a material flatness (a smooth and often matte surface) but of representation itself. Her iconography includes shapes read intellectually and intuitively as three dimensional but with an artful two dimensionality that highlights the insistent flatness of her compositions. A particularly significant and frequent motif is the cone. To Jeon the cone, a classical geometric shape that has also featured prominently in mathematics, became a stand-in for undecidability. It could appear flat or spatial, but to the artist it signals ambiguity in a broader sense. Amidst other specific motifs, a cone appeared simultaneously as important protagonist and unimportant blank. As Jeon has said: “It was like a black hole sucking in all the viewer’s effort to decipher the painting’s narrative, thus, the cone had a very clear reason for existence. A cone gradually became so important that it finally lost its function and disappeared, dispersing fragments and fractions of solid shapes all over.” Jeon’s paintings are explorations of shifting shapes and forms that take on meaning only to shed it again. While Jeon draws on geometric shapes and everyday objects, her paintings also employ a formal language of simplified landscapes reminiscent of early digital imagery, sometimes even alluding to pixelated glitches.