Heekyoung Jeon

Study for Shape of Wind, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 97 × 162 cm

Where the Moonlight Was Most Tranquil

Heekyoung Jeon

Heekyoung Jeon paints landscapes. Although Jeon’s paintings may seem abstract, with their emphasis on gestural brushstrokes, they can still be considered landscapes, based simply on their titles. But more than that, every brushstroke in her works conveys the sense of a huge outdoor space because of their size, direction, superimposition, and perspective. Also, thanks to her characteristic use of various rich shades of blue (e.g., cobalt, ultra-marine, and cerulean), often combined with clear white, many of Jeon’s paintings seem to represent the clouds unfurling across the blue sky. Other works have a dynamic, fluid resonance, as if depicting the ocean, waterfalls, or fountains.

A Spacious Field, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 97 × 162 cm

Flowing Ocean to Me, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 97 × 162 cm

It thus feels natural to find descriptions or representations of actual, concrete landscapes in her works, even though they resemble Abstract Expressionist paintings. The sense of a certain location or landscape is heightened by the exhibition title, The Place Where the Moonlight Was Most Tranquil. To create such landscape paintings, each brushstroke must be quick and intuitive, allowing the paints to mingle before they dry while also recording the pictorial spontaneity and physical movement. Such an approach is quite challenging, requiring tremendous precision, speed, and judgment. Making matters more difficult, Jeon uses acrylic paints, which not only dry very quickly, but also tend to lose their saturation and chroma when mixed, resulting in somewhat dull colors. In order to maximize the color, Jeon tries to use shades and tones that are very similar to one another, through not identical. She also practices bold and unconventional techniques, such as applying multiple colors to a brush at the same time, or “leather brush painting,” which involves using a flat strip of leather as a brush. Through such methods, her pictorial planes resonate with mesmerizing gradations of rich colors and clear spectra of light, like gazing out the window of an airplane.

Arbitrary and Disappearing, but Complete Scenery, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 116 × 72 cm

In the Space Beyond the Window, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 90 × 60 cm

One Day in the Future, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 116 × 91 cm

One Day in the Future, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 116 × 91 cm

One Day in the Future, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 91 × 116 cm

One Day in the Future, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 91 × 116 cm

Her works manifest intense body movements, arbitrary mixtures of colors, lush atmospheric light from the white paint atop the white canvas, and dense textures of darkness and the earth. As suggested by the title The World That Droplets Gather (2020), her works seem to be filled with vapor and mist, evincing a realm of pure imagination. Another prevalent theme is “One Day in the Future,” when light penetrating through clouds illuminates an ethereal paradise, with a purple rainbow in the distance.

The World That Droplets Gather, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 23 × 16 cm

The Last Night, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 23 × 16 cm

From All of Mine, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 40 × 40 cm

Early Dawn, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 41 cm

Also featured in this exhibition are works from Jeon’s Moon series, which consist not of paintings of the moon, but of idealized landscapes rendered on round canvasses. Befitting the moon as something that is always visible but impossible to touch, Jeon’s Abstract Expressionist paintings imply the beauty of a world that has not yet arrived or is just out of reach. Of course, there is a long tradition of projecting such ideals onto the moon, which has a very connotative meaning in Heekyoung Jeon’s paintings. The past tense of The Place Where the Moonlight Was Most Tranquil indicates not only the disappearance of the place, but also its continuance in the form of memory. By recalling that specific place, Jeon’s paintings converge on the very essence of place.

Artistic Director Jinsang Yoo

Moon, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 50 cm (diameter)

Moon, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 60 cm (diameter)

Moon, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 30 cm (diameter)

Heekyoung Jeon’s colors are closely interrelated with her brushstrokes. Of course, many artists use brushes to apply colors. But just as novelists have different writing styles and singers have unique vocal tones, artists have distinct ways of telling stories with their colors and brush. Even artists who attempt realistic representations have different brushstrokes and colors. It is no exaggeration to say that the relationship between the brush and color represents the essence of the act of painting, particularly for abstract painters who use color to organize and express their thoughts and minds.

from The Place Where the Moonlight Was Most Tranquil by Daesik Im (director of ARTERTAIN)

Heekyoung Jeon
b. 1981
Solo Exhibitions
2021 Flat Calm, Artertain, Seoul
2020 The Place Where the Moonlight Was Most Tranquil, Artertain, Seoul
2019 A Tranquil World, Old Rice Cake House, Ansan
2018 As Wind Brushed the Clouds Away, Shinhan Gallery, Seoul
2015 Spiritual Feast, E-land Space, Seoul
2014 Where Are You Among These Ideals, Reality and Desire?, GeomJae GeongSeon Art Museum, Seoul
Selected Group Exhibitions
2021 The Shape of Air, Jeongsejin Art Cube, Incheon
ABSTRACT-ING, Shinsegae Gallery, Busan
2020 Breath, DTC Art Center, Daejeon
Iktsuarpok, SEMA, Seoul
OP. 23 NO. 8 In A FLAT MAJOR, OF, Seoul
2019 Seoullo Media Canvas, Manli-dong Square, Seoul
Awards
2015 Hollo, Artist, Naver Foundation
Etro Award, Silver Prize, Baekwon Foundation
2013 Promising Artists, Winner, Geomjae Jeongseon Art Museum
Residencies
2017–2020 Gyeonggi Creation Center, Ansan
2013 Guandu Residency, Guandu Art Museum, Taipei
2012 Taitung Art Museum, Taitung
2011 Open Space Bae, Busan
2009 Bundanon Trust, New South Wales
Collections
MMCA Art Bank
Baekwon Gallery
E-land Foundation
Geomjae Jeongseon Art Museum
Taitung Art Museum, Taitung, Taiwan
More Less

Waterfalls Unfolding in Front of Our Eyes
Soyeon Ahn

Heekyoung Jeon lines up a ten-panel folding screen in her series titled “Continual Blue” (2021). What does the color blue do in a painting that endlessly appears in which a panoramic view unfolds in contrast to the height emphasized with the vertical placement of the canvases? When, caught in abstraction manifested in rigorous brushstrokes, the viewers’ wide-open eyes move up and down the canvas—the color looks like an afterimage, a figure, or light that has suddenly come right before their eyes. So, you open and close your eyes, and then the mountains and waterfall fill the outline of the blue breaking through the canvas. When the abstraction created by the dynamic strokes covering the canvas intersects with the depth of the blue, the viewer’s eyes can see the shape of the mountains holding the clouds, a waterfall, and the light in a fresh way. Now, the drawing as landscape reveals its visual depth in terms of space and time on the canvases made of ten panels.

When asked how “Continual Blue” is reminiscent of a traditional landscape painting, Jeon spoke about the context of the painting that depicts a mountain journey in her mind. While Jeon interchangeably used the term “concept” as an equivalent for her imagination, she called her painting series a “conceptual landscape,” one that represents a world that does not exist. Not having actual scenery in mind from the outset, the artist seems to have pursued visual representation based on concepts and finally arrives in front of this blue-colored scene where the waterfall bears down. Chasing such conceptual visual representation stimulates the imaginary perception of a place that does not exist in the real world or of an unknown place outside of the real world.

Jeon’s explanation of her conceptual landscape in the context of the Korean painter Jeong Seon’s true-view landscape paintings is very important. She mentioned the Korean landscape painter as many as three or four times, though very briefly. When recalling Jeong Seon’s true-view painting of Mt. Geumgang, Jeon seemed to recall when the scholarly painter from a past Korean dynasty had depicted the true image of the famous mountain on a 21-panel screen while traveling there, as if it were a clue hidden in her own 10-panel landscape painting. She seemed to identify herself with Jeong Seon, who had recalled what he had “seen” at Mt. Geumgang and rendered it on paper after returning home from the faraway mountains. When she was asked about what she’d seen, Jeon replied that she had yet to draw everything she had encountered during her own long journey. Instead, using Jeong Seon’s true-view mountain painting as a clue, Jeon seems to have found a spot where she can unfold the scenes that hang like a waterfall in her mind. As if she’d set off from the foot of the mountain, walked into it, encountered another world beyond the real world, and saw and touched the blue atmosphere encircling all creations, Jeon expresses her overwhelmed senses through colors and depth of feeling. She said she tried to make “space” within the canvases, space being necessary to render the images in her mind as another world as well as an equivalent to pictorial depth through material properties. In Jeon’s paintings, these two cross at a slight spacing and continue to readjust according to the spatial capacities of each.

Heekyoung Jeon’s series “40th Spring,” which makes the viewer think of the moment when a rapid spontaneous act is made, recalls the movement of a human body gliding on thin icy ground in pursuit of slow and careful thoughts. The reason we might incorrectly think of a large brush moving suddenly between canvas and a body is that the act of brushing is viewed as the only act done in the work. However, Jeon creates a route through space for her imagination, which she has referred to as a concept, as well as for the carefully considered fragmentary thoughts that are drawn as standing before an empty canvas in order to enter a square grid by repeatedly going in and out of the space. For example, in “A Study on Wind” and “Research on Air” (2019), Jeon left carefully selected traces on the surface, using unique brushes such as tools coated with paint made by attaching rubber roller squeegees or wide wallpaper brushes attached to a long stick.

In the series “40th Spring” and artworks “A Study on Wind” (2019) and “Research on Air” (2019), larger brushes and material properties reveal as much space as possible in the paintings. Here it seems that the artist has projected phenomenal experiences that mediate “sensual perception” onto an imaginary substance that she has conceptualized, as she has been in search of methods to build a pictorial space that encompasses the sensual perception. Although her landscape paintings do not begin with an actual or specific reference, the artist gives insight into abstract or invisible beings through her own sensual perception by pursuing shapes that represent the depth within a painting’s space, thus making what is imaginary as if it was real. In other words, it can be said that the unreal and abstract thoughts running through her head—with the aid of internalized sensual perception—break through a cascade-like covering or are in a somewhat fundamental form enclosed by the covering, facilitating the restoration of our visual depth.

Jeong Seon painted Mt. Geumgang all his life. As a young man, while traveling in the mountains, he had given himself over to drawing their actual appearance—one that is free of any preconceptions—whereas as an old man, the painter called upon his recollections of the mountains’ scenery to depict it in an abstract manner. He pulled out of the darkness of memory the mystical sensual perception that he’d acquired when he “saw” the real view deep in the mountains, and reinterpreted this feeling as abstract thought expressed through the depth of space in his paintings that lay between the artist and the object. And this abstract thinking seems to be linked to the undertone in Heekyoung Jeon’s series “Continual Blue.”

“Continual Blue,” a work in the form of a ten-panel folding screen, contains a scene that the artist has imagined. The imagination materializes an invisible being and also clearly shows a kind of “excessive” sensation of real scenery as a true view. In other words, while Jeong Seon emphasized the true view of the scenery observed by his own eyes while traveling to the valleys of Mt. Geumgang, Jeon resembles Jeong Seon’s attitude in the later part of his life when he recollected his experiences and tried to understand the true view of the scenery once again from his own perspective. For this reason, “Continual Blue” seems to show the entire view of a green-colored mountain with waterfalls, clouds, and fog. However, the artist, who has adopted the rhetorical time and space of typical landscape painting as the basis of her own pictorial time and space, is in effect looking for a painterly sensation that enables the existence of sensual perception and abstract thinking to be realized. “Continual Blue” replaces a series of such sensation and perception with the experience of pictorial time and space generated by color, and reveals the context in which the artist replaces the fundamental experience of the subject toward an unstable world that connotes the uncertainty of “death” in contrast to sublime utopia and visual liberation from what “can be seen.”

Waterfalls Unfolding in Front of Our Eyes
Soyeon Ahn

Heekyoung Jeon lines up a ten-panel folding screen in her series titled “Continual Blue” (2021). What does the color blue do in a painting that endlessly appears in which a panoramic view unfolds in contrast to the height emphasized with the vertical placement of the canvases? When, caught in abstraction manifested in rigorous brushstrokes, the viewers’ wide-open eyes move up and down the canvas—the color looks like an afterimage, a figure, or light that has suddenly come right before their eyes. So, you open and close your eyes, and then the mountains and waterfall fill the outline of the blue breaking through the canvas. When the abstraction created by the dynamic strokes covering the canvas intersects with the depth of the blue, the viewer’s eyes can see the shape of the mountains holding the clouds, a waterfall, and the light in a fresh way. Now, the drawing as landscape reveals its visual depth in terms of space and time on the canvases made of ten panels.

When asked how “Continual Blue” is reminiscent of a traditional landscape painting, Jeon spoke about the context of the painting that depicts a mountain journey in her mind. While Jeon interchangeably used the term “concept” as an equivalent for her imagination, she called her painting series a “conceptual landscape,” one that represents a world that does not exist. Not having actual scenery in mind from the outset, the artist seems to have pursued visual representation based on concepts and finally arrives in front of this blue-colored scene where the waterfall bears down. Chasing such conceptual visual representation stimulates the imaginary perception of a place that does not exist in the real world or of an unknown place outside of the real world.

Jeon’s explanation of her conceptual landscape in the context of the Korean painter Jeong Seon’s true-view landscape paintings is very important. She mentioned the Korean landscape painter as many as three or four times, though very briefly. When recalling Jeong Seon’s true-view painting of Mt. Geumgang, Jeon seemed to recall when the scholarly painter from a past Korean dynasty had depicted the true image of the famous mountain on a 21-panel screen while traveling there, as if it were a clue hidden in her own 10-panel landscape painting. She seemed to identify herself with Jeong Seon, who had recalled what he had “seen” at Mt. Geumgang and rendered it on paper after returning home from the faraway mountains. When she was asked about what she’d seen, Jeon replied that she had yet to draw everything she had encountered during her own long journey. Instead, using Jeong Seon’s true-view mountain painting as a clue, Jeon seems to have found a spot where she can unfold the scenes that hang like a waterfall in her mind. As if she’d set off from the foot of the mountain, walked into it, encountered another world beyond the real world, and saw and touched the blue atmosphere encircling all creations, Jeon expresses her overwhelmed senses through colors and depth of feeling. She said she tried to make “space” within the canvases, space being necessary to render the images in her mind as another world as well as an equivalent to pictorial depth through material properties. In Jeon’s paintings, these two cross at a slight spacing and continue to readjust according to the spatial capacities of each.

Heekyoung Jeon’s series “40th Spring,” which makes the viewer think of the moment when a rapid spontaneous act is made, recalls the movement of a human body gliding on thin icy ground in pursuit of slow and careful thoughts. The reason we might incorrectly think of a large brush moving suddenly between canvas and a body is that the act of brushing is viewed as the only act done in the work. However, Jeon creates a route through space for her imagination, which she has referred to as a concept, as well as for the carefully considered fragmentary thoughts that are drawn as standing before an empty canvas in order to enter a square grid by repeatedly going in and out of the space. For example, in “A Study on Wind” and “Research on Air” (2019), Jeon left carefully selected traces on the surface, using unique brushes such as tools coated with paint made by attaching rubber roller squeegees or wide wallpaper brushes attached to a long stick.

In the series “40th Spring” and artworks “A Study on Wind” (2019) and “Research on Air” (2019), larger brushes and material properties reveal as much space as possible in the paintings. Here it seems that the artist has projected phenomenal experiences that mediate “sensual perception” onto an imaginary substance that she has conceptualized, as she has been in search of methods to build a pictorial space that encompasses the sensual perception. Although her landscape paintings do not begin with an actual or specific reference, the artist gives insight into abstract or invisible beings through her own sensual perception by pursuing shapes that represent the depth within a painting’s space, thus making what is imaginary as if it was real. In other words, it can be said that the unreal and abstract thoughts running through her head—with the aid of internalized sensual perception—break through a cascade-like covering or are in a somewhat fundamental form enclosed by the covering, facilitating the restoration of our visual depth.

Jeong Seon painted Mt. Geumgang all his life. As a young man, while traveling in the mountains, he had given himself over to drawing their actual appearance—one that is free of any preconceptions—whereas as an old man, the painter called upon his recollections of the mountains’ scenery to depict it in an abstract manner. He pulled out of the darkness of memory the mystical sensual perception that he’d acquired when he “saw” the real view deep in the mountains, and reinterpreted this feeling as abstract thought expressed through the depth of space in his paintings that lay between the artist and the object. And this abstract thinking seems to be linked to the undertone in Heekyoung Jeon’s series “Continual Blue.”

“Continual Blue,” a work in the form of a ten-panel folding screen, contains a scene that the artist has imagined. The imagination materializes an invisible being and also clearly shows a kind of “excessive” sensation of real scenery as a true view. In other words, while Jeong Seon emphasized the true view of the scenery observed by his own eyes while traveling to the valleys of Mt. Geumgang, Jeon resembles Jeong Seon’s attitude in the later part of his life when he recollected his experiences and tried to understand the true view of the scenery once again from his own perspective. For this reason, “Continual Blue” seems to show the entire view of a green-colored mountain with waterfalls, clouds, and fog. However, the artist, who has adopted the rhetorical time and space of typical landscape painting as the basis of her own pictorial time and space, is in effect looking for a painterly sensation that enables the existence of sensual perception and abstract thinking to be realized. “Continual Blue” replaces a series of such sensation and perception with the experience of pictorial time and space generated by color, and reveals the context in which the artist replaces the fundamental experience of the subject toward an unstable world that connotes the uncertainty of “death” in contrast to sublime utopia and visual liberation from what “can be seen.”