Hyunsun Jeon

Hyunsun Jeon was born in 1989 in Seoul. She received her BFA and MFA in painting from Ewha Womans University in 2014 and 2018. The artist lives and works in Seoul.

The artist has been awarded and selected for the 20th Song Eun Art Award, Song Eun Art and Cultural Foundation (2020), Chong Kun Dang Fine Arts Prize (2017), ARKO Artist Curator Workshop (2015), 37th JoongAng Fine Art Prize, JoongAng Ilbo (2015), 99°C Promising Art Support Program, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (2014), Sangsangmadang Membership Card Artwork Proposal: Art in Your Pocket, KT&G (2013), and Seoul Digital University Art Prize (2013).

Hyunsun Jeon has invented a unique pictorial language that employs a chromatic palette predominated by greens, blacks, and blues. Her expansive vocabulary of proportion—some simplified passages for example relate to pixelation in early video games—is suspended between symbolic geometry and suggestive landscape conveying an impending sense of poetic absence and artificial presence.

Developing a characteristic approach to the medium, Jeon’s early work combined the use of traditional Korean pigment and paint suspended in contemporary acrylic polymer to create a variety of distinct surface textures. Her recent work has explored the medium of watercolor on canvas to build images slowly with small brushstrokes, allowing layers and objects to blend into each other yet yield a flat surface. The geometric forms in her paintings are often echoed in the three-dimensional structures in which she stages her works.