JEONG Yun Kyung: Stone Planet

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Gallery EXIT is pleased to present Korean artist JeongYun Kyung’s solo exhibition ‘Stone Planet’, on show between 18 March and 22 April, 2023.

Always personal and sensational, Jeong’s works, as a response to her immediate surroundings, embody her own intimate emotions and experiences. Rendered in a combination of bold colours, lines, and gestures, her paintings summon up the experience of witnessing or expecting the passing through of a meteoroid over a serene landscape before one’s eyes. With this latest series of paintings, the artist aims to capture the fleeting moment, a flash of time that one experiences, and express the sensations and memories evoked by such decisive moments.

In Jeong’s practice, recurring natural motifs and shapes, such as feather, leaf, spiral, wave, are layered in different sections of the painting and are crucial elements that have been present and developed since the beginning of her artistic practice. Executed with care and relatively light in colour and tone, the ridged and layered parts have a quality of detailed neatness about them, evoking a feeling of tranquility. In contrast and parallel to this calmness, spontaneous brushstrokes, spray-painted lines and splashes of paint of bold and vivid colours permeate the painting surface in an unrestrained manner, symbolising such artificial elements as plastic, neon, traffic, which is loud, boisterous and exciting.This new series is Jeong’s devoted and continued exploration of the visual language of abstract painting.

Having studied and been inspired by traditional Eastern abstract painting, she is interested in the reinterpretation of this tradition, experimenting with marks and lines that generate different feelings, qualities and finishings in similar spatial arrangements. These mixed media works consist of various materials applied onto the same raw canvas surface: oil paint, spray paint, coloured pencil, pencil, crayon, and paper collages, in splashes and patches. These collages of contrary elements and experiences, natural and artificial, busy and quiet, seem at once to fight against and live in harmony with one another. The series ‘Archetype of Night’ is inspired by the artist’s experience living in a confined space for over a year. Using layers of collages, strokes and recurring motifs, the artist slowly and carefully creates in these paintings a viewing experience resembling that of the isolated and silent space of social seclusion. The works in the ‘Meteor’ series, in contrast, are the brief moments of flashing thoughts and memories, akin to the social media experience today. The use of thick and bold lines, loud and uncontrolled, was initially developed on the artist’s smartphone during the pandemic when she could not travel to her studio.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

JEONG Yun Kyung (b. 1981, Incheon) graduated from The Slade School of Fine Art with a Master of Fine Arts in 2008, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of Art Design at Ewha Womans University in 2006. Her works have been widely exhibited internationally. Solo exhibitions include ‘Stone Planet’ (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2023), ‘Killing the Night’ (Triump Gallery, Moscow, 2022), ‘Finger Spell’ (Graphite on Pink, Seoul, 2021), ‘Dash and Symphony’ (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2020), 'Intimate Immensity’ (Triumph Gallery, Moscow, 2018), 'Structural Sensibility’ (Art’Loft, Brussels, 2016), 'In-Sync’ (Gallery Koo, Seoul, 2015). Selected group exhibitions include ‘Ways of Seeing’ (Jarilager Gallery, Cologne, 2022), ‘In Search of Absence’ (Korean Cultural Center Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2021), 'Asia Now Paris’ (Art’s Loft/Lee-Bauwens Gallery, Paris, 2019), 'Lines of Flight’ (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2016). JEONG was one of the finalists of 'The Columbia Threadneedle Prize’ in 2012 and the 'Joongang Fine Art Prize’ in 2008. Her works are part of art collections such as 'Tiroche DeLeon Collection’, 'National Museum of Modern, Contemporary Art, Korea’ and 'OCI Museum of Art’, Seoul. JEONG currently lives and works in Seoul.