Sujeon Mae

Sujeon Mae’s paintings begin with small, everyday events, such as moments spent with a friend or a fallen leaf discovered by chance on the street. For the artist, these experiences are not subjects to be simply reproduced, but seeds of images that are transformed and reconstructed through memory and emotion. Rather than the experience itself, she focuses on the feelings, desires, and memories through which she looks back on that moment from the present. After completing a painting, the artist sands away parts or the entirety of the surface, removing color and obscuring forms while revealing traces from earlier layers. Drawing and erasing thus become part of the same process of creating an image. Because the outcome of sanding cannot be fully controlled, the artist observes the traces that emerge by chance and sometimes redraws them as light. These revealed traces extend beyond memories of the past toward a sense of time that has yet to come. The light becomes a desire and a possibility—a quiet hope for the next scene, even while accepting that life may flow in an unknown direction. Her paintings hold layers of time in which images are drawn, erased, revealed, and drawn again, moving from small moments of everyday life toward the light of an unwritten future.