Seoul, South Korea, b. 1995

Jaeyeon Leem explores a strange sense of novelty from unfamiliar sensations. The artist earned her undergraduate degree in painting from Ewha Womans University and is currently pursuing her master’s in the same institution. In her painting, peculiar emotions entangle with the world and result in its own fantasies. As our familiar world feels inadequate and incomplete, this uncharted mystic realm exerts a greater force upon us. The mythic motifs that appear in her work serve to amplify these sensations of strangeness, mystery, and fear that we have not encountered previously in our world. The unseen and unexperienced world feels like the underbelly of the real world, yet it is a space that makes us conscious of the depths within the human mind. Her art seeks to reconcile the coexistence of dualities such as reality and unreality, desire and repression, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and within these tensions, she expresses the will and hope of life, aspirations, yearnings and fears. Her abstract gestures, intertwined with hidden forms, continually weave a narrative between the worlds she has experienced and those she has never encountered, revealing the artist's connection to an alien and mystical realm. The artist’s work is akin to myths - mysterious yet not fantasy or fiction bur rather a world that closely resembles the non-fictional, one she has sensed and felt.