Introduction

Esther Schipper is delighted to announce When you understand my secret, it becomes a ghost, Hyunsun Jeon’s first solo presentation with the gallery. On view will be 10 new paintings by Jeon whose representation was announced in February of this year.

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.

Installed in a loose grouping across three walls, Jeon’s constellation makes the paintings appear to shift across the space. Echoing the overlapping and superimposition of motifs in the paintings themselves, the empty sections between the works is activated and becomes present as a kind of virtual space, an effect akin to windows on a computer screen or the layering of trompe l’oeil still lifes found on traditional folding screens found throughout East Asia.

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.

Initially drawn to the mechanics of storytelling in folktales, mythology and religion, Jeon has sought a narration specific to the practice of painting. Inspired by the scenery surrounding the religious figures in altarpieces, Jeon forges a world in which the main character—the saints and sinners—are omitted. Instead shapes, strokes and colors, caught in the constant maelstrom of becoming, occupy it. Yet, while her art historical references to medieval altarpieces remain visible in the compositional structure, her aesthetic is grounded in the now. Jeon knowingly incorporates aspects of the digital world, in particular her generation’s familiarity with and visual socialization through early video games. To Jeon, her work is a translation into analog form of characteristics she associates with the digital—among them being clear, sharp, smooth, sleek, or superficial.

Her seriousness about what it means to be looking at something, explains Jeon’s affinity for the work of Paul Cézanne. The French painter’s comment to his younger friend Emile Bernard “to treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, [and] the cone” resonated deeply with Jeon and to this day determines her artistic vision. Jeon’s paintings don’t tell stories or depict situations but in making us question every shape, plane, and motif, they communicate the uncertainness of our existence.