Soyoung Jeon

Soyoung Jeon brings onto the canvas plants she has grown and tended herself, as well as subjects and landscapes encountered repeatedly over days of daily walks. For her, “to see” is not merely to register visual information, but to engage in a synesthetic experience accompanied by the texture of surfaces, the volume of air, and even the scent of the wind. Through the accumulation of such sensations, she turns her attention to the layers of time formed in relation to her subjects, that is, to “relationship.” The beings she has met again and again, listening closely to what they seem to say, are often small, fragile, and easily overlooked. Yet she believes that these ordinary and delicate presences ultimately sustain herself, the world, and one another. The plants in her paintings are not simple representations of nature, but traces of relationships built over time and spaces in which the sensation of “aliveness” is quietly questioned. She reflects on the idea that to be alive also implies moving toward death. Just as blooming and withering coexist within a single plant, her paintings hold together states of emergence and disappearance. Infusing the picture plane with the sensibilities she has learned through nature, she continues painting as a gesture of closely touching the world.