Hyunjeong Lim (b. 1987) has continued her painterly exploration of ‘Mindscape,’ presenting fantastical and surreal perspectives that reflect the realities of lived experience. Her work is grounded in intuitive drawing, in which images are rendered spontaneously by the movement of the hand. The resulting compositions invite viewers to slowly observe the surface in its entirety, evoking a wide range of emotional responses.

Lim’s artistic world was profoundly shaped during her studies in London, where she encountered and was deeply influenced by drawings and paintings by Northern European masters such as Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, and Albrecht Dürer, whose works explore themes of imagination, dreams, and myth. She also draws upon Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious and archetypes to articulate the realms of imagination and the unconscious.
 
By incorporating references from earlier art history that engage with imagination, fantasy, and the surreal into her own inner landscapes, Lim reinterprets emotions, memories, and imagined spaces—though not visibly present yet perceptible—as unreal and fairy-tale-like scenes.

Within her work, memory and experience are not arranged or stored in a linear or logical order. Rather than confining them within a complete narrative or a singular interpretive framework, Lim develops her compositions as open structures that are fluid and nonlinear, grounded in memory, sensation, emotion, and dreams.
 
The living beings, heterogeneous entities, and images drawn from everyday life that are juxtaposed within a single composition may at first appear unrelated. Yet within her pictorial space, they form invisible organic connections and establish a new internal order. This prevents the viewer’s gaze from settling in one fixed point, instead inviting it to drift slowly across the surface in accordance with one’s own inner flow, discovering new associations and meanings shaped by individual experience.

In her 2016 solo exhibition 《Islands of the Mind》 at OCI Museum of Art, Hyunjeong Lim drew upon Carl Jung’s concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes to depict a fairy-tale-like and primordial realm of the unconscious composed of archetypal images that exist within the minds of all people.
 
The exhibition title “Islands of the Mind” was inspired by Jung’s statement that “the ego floats like an island on the sea of archetypes.” In this exhibition, the artist presented works portraying the self—or multiple selves—floating like islands upon the vast sea of the mind.

The islands of the mind depicted in Hyunjeong Lim’s paintings are structured as seemingly accidental and indiscriminate assemblages of unfamiliar images. What renders her paintings uncanny is not so much the images themselves, but the unfamiliarity that arises from the way they are arranged and composed.
 
This structure resists the assignment of fixed, individual meanings to each object. Instead, meaning emerges through the relationships between objects, inviting viewers to infer significance from their placement and interaction within the pictorial space.

The pictorial space, composed of objects arranged in a non-linear configuration, recalls the fantastical compositions of Northern Renaissance painters. Lim appropriates images drawn from these masters’ visionary works and attempts to fuse them with images summoned from the strata of her own personal experiences and memories. In other words, she weaves together appropriated imagery and personal history—consciousness and the unconscious—as warp and weft into a unified visual tapestry.

For instance, fragments of everyday reality—such as a chimney made of porcelain from an English manor, ordinary objects seen in a Japanese general store, impressions of the weather and climate in Hamburg, Germany, and scenes from the sea near her hometown—are placed, interwoven, and restructured alongside appropriated images in an indiscriminate manner.
 
Although these images originate from the artist’s personal history and private experiences, they are brought together, intertwined, and reorganized through the methodologies she draws upon—such as automatism, free association, and the stream-of-consciousness technique. As a result, all interpretations remain open, contingent, and inherently subjective.

Meanwhile, after relocating to the United States following her periods of work in London and Korea, Hyunjeong Lim’s practice began to show notable changes. In her work produced in the U.S., elements of real landscapes increasingly intervene and expand within her imagined landscapes compared to her earlier paintings.
 
For example, in her 2020 solo exhibition 《Strangers in a Strange World》, held in California, the artist experimentally visualized California’s nature and diversity, as well as the complex emotions associated with being a stranger.

The work Strangers in a Strange World (2018), which shares its title with the exhibition, quite literally depicts figures who appear as strangers living in a strange world. It presents a new world created during the artist’s time living in the United States, where imagined imagery is layered onto scenes from her everyday surroundings.
 
Within this strange world, the figures are portrayed engaging in actions that seem out of place, unconcerned with their surroundings. These characters, emerging from the artist’s mind while living abroad, appear to personify the complex emotions of being a stranger, while also evoking contemporary individuals who remain wary of one another.

Meanwhile, the solo exhibition 《Inspiration Point》, held in 2023 at A-Lounge Contemporary, consisted entirely of spontaneous and intuitive drawings rather than the acrylic paintings the artist had previously presented.
 
By adopting drawing as a format, Lim sought to more directly capture her process of starting from a single point and gradually assembling the infinite forms that arise in her mind. Through this approach, she aimed to trace the “inspiration point” that has long served as the foundation of her painting practice.

During her studies in London, Lim developed a deep interest in Renaissance ink drawings and their realistic yet highly complex compositional structures after seeing a major exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci at the National Gallery.
 
Inspired by this experience, her drawings incorporate elements of the surreal landscapes of the American West that she encountered after relocating to the United States, as well as scenes from her personal life and imagination-provoking iconography. These elements are subtly embedded throughout the compositions, inviting viewers to discover them as if engaging in a visual game of hidden images.

Her process begins by preparing a colored ground on the surface of the canvas or paper, upon which she then draws forms. This process does not follow a predetermined plan; rather, it gradually takes shape starting from a particular “point of inspiration,” often initiated by an object such as a tree or a rock.
 
Through spontaneous and intuitive drawing, combinations of iconographic elements that the artist has unconsciously accumulated over time begin to emerge. For instance, the exhibited work Inspiration Point, which shares its title with the exhibition, consists of two pieces. One of them was created based on her experience visiting “Inspiration Point,” a scenic overlook located in Bryce Canyon National Park.

During a road trip through Utah and Nevada in the United States, the artist encountered a landscape of surreal red rock formations and vast canyons. In her working notes, she wrote, “It felt like an alien planet, like the setting of the film Star Wars, and as if I had discovered in reality the unreal landscapes I had previously only imagined in my drawings.”
 
Within this world that exists at the boundary between reality and unreality, the actual and the imagined, the artist once again recalled the works of Bosch and Bruegel. Another work titled Inspiration Point was created within this trajectory. It is a large-scale color drawing measuring approximately 2 meters wide and 1 meter high, composed of landscapes from various places the artist has traveled to, including Hawaii, combined with her own fantastical and fairy-tale-like objects.

In 2025, her solo exhibition 《Archive of the Mind: Pacific Crossing》, held at ATELIER AKI, continued to present Lim’s ever-flowing and expanding “mindscape,” exploring the possibility of genuine painterly communication at the intersection of life and art, reality and imagination, and the self and others.
 
The exhibition title 《Archive of the Mind》 reflects Lim’s ongoing practice of collecting and layering fragments of lived experience, emotional shifts, sensory impressions shaped by the cultural and psychological boundaries she has navigated since relocating to the West Coast of the United States in 2018. Her canvases act as a personal archive, a space where internal records of memory take visual form through her creative practice.
 
The exhibition was composed of paintings that encapsulated the artist’s accumulated life experiences and inner transformations across Korea, the American West, and Europe, unfolding as a journey expressed through her distinctive intuitive drawing and painterly language.

In the works presented in this exhibition, Lim reinterprets not only the works of Northern Renaissance masters but also the dreams and fantasies of ideal realms embedded in traditional East Asian landscape painting. She juxtaposes the dreamlike utopian vision of East Asian landscape painting with the vast natural landscapes of the United States.
 
The vast scale of nature, shifting light and weather, and coastal imagery in her work are drawn from lived travel experiences, yet they also evoke a visual reinterpretation of the dreamlike ideals found in East Asian art, reflecting the spirit of Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land, where reality and fantasy fluidly coexist.

Through the practice of intuitive drawing guided by spontaneous gestures and the flow of the unconscious, Hyunjeong Lim translates emotions, memories, and imagined realms that, though unseen, are deeply perceived, into fantastical, otherworldly scenes.
 
The private inner images constructed within the open structure of her compositions invite individual interpretations and emotional responses from viewers, forming a flexible network of relationships. Her work suggests that although each person’s cultural background and inner landscape may be different and unfamiliar, they can nevertheless be meaningfully connected through the medium of painting.

 ”I visualize imagined inner landscapes through intuitive drawing, allowing images to emerge spontaneously as my hand moves. This process reflects my lived experiences and emotions, while also seeking to depict a fantastical, surreal world through painting."   (Hyunjeong Lim, Artist’s Note) 

Hyunjeong Lim studied Western painting at Seoul National University and earned her MFA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in London. Her solo exhibitions include 《Archive of the Mind: Pacific Crossing》 (ATELIER AKI, Seoul, 2025), 《Trip West》 (Gallery 4Culture, Seattle, USA , 2025), 《Inspiration Point》 (A-Lounge Contemporary, Seoul, 2023), and 《Strangers in a Strange World》 (Pacific Campus of Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco, USA, 2020).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《This is not just local: Tactical Practices》 (Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, 2024), 《Landscape of the Mind》 (Korean Cultural Center Washington, D.C., Washington, D.C., 2023), 《Manwha-Kyung》 (A-Lounge Contemporary, Seoul, 2022), 《Edited Landscape》 (Gana Busan, Busan, 2022), 《The Show Windows》 (Coventry City of Culture Project, Coventry, UK, 2021), and 《NANJI 10th Review: Report and Recall》 (SeMA Storage, Seoul, 2017).
 
Lim was selected as one of the artists for ‘OCI Young Creatives 2016’, and her works in the collections of the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, the Seoul National University Museum of Art, the MMCA Art Bank, and the OCI Museum of Art.

References

• 임현정, Hyunjeong Lim (Artist Website)
• OCI미술관, [서문] Islands of the Mind (OCI Museum of Art, [Preface] Islands of the Mind)
• 서울대학교미술관, [작품 설명] Strangers in a Strange World (Seoul National University Museum of Art, [Artwork Description] Strangers in a Strange World)
• 에이라운지 컨템포러리, [전시 개요 & 서문] Inspiration Point (A-Lounge Contemporary, [Exhibition Overview & Preface] Inspiration Point)
• 아뜰리에 아키, [서문] 마음의 아카이브: 태평양을 건너며 (ATELIER AKI, [Preface] Archive of the Mind: Across the Pacific)