Hyunsun Jeon Cutting Cake and Drawing some Shapes, 2023

Hyunsun Jeon has developed a distinct iconography that combines figurative elements, such as trees, fruits, and objects from everyday life, with abstract forms, color planes and, increasingly since 2014, sets of classic geometric shapes. Jeon’s forms are engaged in a constant shift between dimensions and associations—a cone, for example, may occur as a triangle, rendered with color gradients to suggest depth, or in the form of vulcanoes, mountains or hats. Jeon’s project has an all-encompassing, even world-building quality: quoting different styles as motifs, a work might simultaneously include painterly passages, pointillist sections or simulated brushstrokes, and motifs that have the linear quality of digital renderings or pixelation.

Working in a medium that has traditionally thrived on creating the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, Jeon’s work celebrates flatness. Her preferred medium, watercolor, achieves saturation and shallowness, maintaining a relatively thin layer of paint. Sometimes pierced by holes that open up views “into” the painting or superimposed fragments, Jeon finds ways to continuously remind the viewer of the planarity of the canvas, of looking at a flat surface, and of the actual thinness of the paint that supplies the illusion of depth.