JEONG Yun Kyung: Floating Paradox
鄭潤慶《Floating Paradox》
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14 June - 12 July 2025
Gallery EXIT is pleased to present paintings by JEONG Yun Kyung ‘Floating Paradox’, featuring works selected from a decade-long collaboration that traces the artist's remarkable evolution as she synthesises Eastern and Western artistic traditions through architectural precision and ethereal abstraction. This exhibition showcases works spanning ten years of partnership between the artist and Gallery EXIT, revealing how Jeong has developed her distinctive practice around axonometric projection—a technical drafting method she recontextualises through Eastern philosophy to create spatial paradoxes that interrogate cultural hybridity and reimagine the boundaries between reality and utopia. The selected works reveal Jeong's mastery of axonometric projection, a technique that represents three-dimensional forms without perspective distortion, creating a ‘floating’ effect where geometric structures and organic flows collide. Working intuitively yet with architectural precision, she transforms rigid orthographic projections into meditative landscapes where crystalline forms emerge from fog-like washes of paint. Her distinctive visual vocabulary—rhomboid grids dissolving into nebulous gradients, prismatic structures interlaced with rocky formations—creates what she calls ‘architectural daydreaming’, spaces that oscillate between flat patterns and volumetric depth. This synthesis reflects Daoist concepts of yin-yang, where opposites coexist interdependently, and Buddhist notions of interdependence, visualising a harmonious complexity in which cultural binaries dissolve. This decade of artistic development reflects both technical innovation and deeply personal transformation. The evolution visible across the selected works—from her early Axonometry series through recent explorations in Stone Planet and Archetype of Night—traces her journey as a cultural interlocutor navigating between her Seoul origins and London education at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her shift from nocturnal to daylight painting, prompted by motherhood, parallels her philosophical journey, as Eastern cosmology's emphasis on subjective experience increasingly permeates her work. Each painting functions as a meditative provocation, inviting viewers to project their own narratives onto ambiguous forms that suggest both urban sprawl and celestial mappings, technological precision and natural growth. JEONG Yun Kyung (born in 1981, Incheon, South Korea), graduated from the College of Art and Design at Ewha Womans University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2006, and from the Slade School of Fine Art with a Master of Fine Arts in 2008. Jeong finds a delicate balance between Eastern and Western artistic traditions by fusing East Asian ink with abstract expressionism from the West. Jeong plays with perspective and exploits empty space on the canvas to create a complex visual language. Often without a pre-planned concept in mind, her works are a response to her immediate surroundings and happenings, which embody her own intimate emotions and experiences. Jeong’s solo exhibitions at Gallery EXIT in Hong Kong include ‘Stone Planet’ (2023) and ‘Dash and Symphony’ (2020). Other selected solo exhibitions include ‘Quotidian Fever’ (Jarilagerg Gallery, Cologne, 2025), ‘Archetype of Night’ (Graphite on Pink Gallery, Seoul, 2023), ‘Killing the Night’ (Triumph Gallery, Moscow, 2022), Finger Spell (Graphite on Pink, Seoul, 2021), Intimate Immensity (Triumph Gallery, Moscow, 2018), ‘Structural Sensibility’ (Art’Loft, Brussels, 2016), and ‘In-Sync’ (Gallery Koo, Seoul, 2015). Selected group show participations include ‘In Search of Absence’ (Korean Cultural Center Hong Kong, 2021), ‘Moscow–Seoul: Common Intelligence’ (The Museum of Moscow, Russia, 2021), Asia Now Paris (Art’s Loft / Lee-Bauwens Gallery, Paris, 2019), and ‘Lines of Flight’ (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2016). Jeong’s works are in the collections of the Tiroche DeLeon Collection; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; and the OCI Museum in Seoul, Korea. The artist currently lives and works in Seoul. |