Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Recent solo exhibitions include 《Here and There》(Galerie Lelong & Co., 2025), 《When you understand my secret, it becomes a ghost》(Esther Shipper, Berlin 2024), 《Two, Lying Down, Exposed Roots》 (Johyun Gallery, Haeundae, 2024), 《Meet Me in the Middle》 (Gallery2, Seoul, 2022), 《Red Green Corners》 (P21, Seoul, 2019), 《Parallel Paths》 (Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, 2018), 《Everything and Nothing》 (Weekend, Seoul, 2017), and more.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Color, Shape and Active Audience》 (Gyeongnam Art Museum, Gyeongsangnam-do, 2024), the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale 《THIS TOO, IS A MAP》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023), 《DUI JIP KI》 (Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2023), 《ARTSPECTRUM 2022》 (Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《Dancing Casper》 (SAGA, Seoul, 2021), and 《20th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2020).

Awards (Selected)

Hyunsun Jeon was selected as one of the three finalists for the 2024 Jean-François Prat Prize, a prestigious French painting award. In 2023, Jeon was selected for Frieze x Chanel: Next & Now Series. She won the Excellence Award at the 20th SONGEUN Art Award in 2020 and the Chongkundang Fine Arts Prize in 2017.

Collections (Selected)

Her works are part of collections at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), SeMA, Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (Ansan), Suwon Ipark Museum of Art (Suwon).

Originality & Identity

Hyunsun Jeon’s work begins by capturing the subtle and ambiguous moments, memories, and emotions embedded in everyday life. Rather than reproducing specific scenes, she seeks to convey emotional textures or atmospheric undercurrents that resist verbal articulation. This intention is expressed through geometric forms, color fields, and repetitive imagery. In early works like 〈Road to Endless Opposites〉(2011) and 〈A Gratifying Ending〉(2011), Jeon reconfigures characters and symbols from fairy tales, dismantling binary notions of good and evil to reflect the complexity of relationships and the polysemous nature of scenes embedded in memory.

In her 2014 solo exhibition 《The Cone and Conversations》 at Place MAK, she introduced geometric forms as new visual elements. Cones, depicted alongside objects from legends and mythology, resist fixed interpretation, instead serving as visual metaphors for unresolved enigmas that exist in a pre-linguistic state. As her thematic inquiries evolved over time, they extended beyond specific narratives to explore fragments of memory, disconnections and connections within relationships, and the instability of meaning.

In the 2018 solo exhibition 《Parallel Paths》 at Alternative Space LOOP, Jeon arranged 15 canvases side by side, constructing a loosely connected visual aggregate akin to the relationship between words and sentences. The images emphasized the flow of association and disjunction over fixed meaning. By focusing on the absence of definitive narratives and the impossibility of seamless communication, she transforms ambiguity into a narrative possibility within painting.

Style & Contents

Jeon has developed a distinct visual style by combining the traditional medium of watercolor with introspective content and visually complex compositions. Her surfaces are composed of thin, flat layers, where forms such as clouds, trees, and objects are rendered through repetitive dots, lines, and planes. Rather than focusing on pictorial density, her work leans toward flatness, fragmentation, and partiality, sometimes incorporating found imagery sourced from the internet.

In her 2016 solo exhibition 《Nameless Mountain》 at LEE HWAIK Gallery, the cone motif evolved into mountain-like forms, blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. Her subsequent exhibition 《Black Green Mouth》(2018, Gallery2) featured geometric color fields with minimal reference to recognizable objects, suggesting the potential integration of painting with structural installations.

Her approach to composition has shifted from treating the canvas as a singular frame to a modular system of assembly. Works like 〈Parallel Paths (1)~(15)〉(2017) are presented as a collective arrangement of canvases, while in 《ARTSPECTRUM 2022》 at the Leeum Museum of Art, she assembled canvases into walls and columns, transforming the paintings into immersive spatial structures.

In her recent solo exhibition 《Two, Lying Down, Exposed Roots》(2024, Johyun Gallery) and the group show 《Dui Jip Ki / 뒤집기》(2023, Esther Schipper), Jeon expanded her panoramic visual language, emphasizing painting’s physical occupation of space. These installation-based experiments deconstruct the traditional parameters of painting and propose a model of meaning-making that is both fluid and open-ended.

Topography & Continuity

Since the beginning of her career, Hyunsun Jeon has persistently sought to translate the trivial, the ambiguous, and the unspeakable into painterly language. For her, painting is not a vehicle for clear interpretation but an intimate space where unresolved questions and sensory fragments are interwoven. The recurring geometric motifs—circles, triangles, cones—function not merely as forms, but as fragmentary micro-narratives and visualizations of pre-verbal sensation in an era where grand narratives have eroded. Jeon redefines painting as an organic entity that operates in the interstitial space between language and non-language, figuration and abstraction, meaning and meaninglessness.

In recent works, she expands painting beyond a singular medium into a composite environment, combining the flatness of digital space with the materiality of watercolor, and juxtaposing geometric order with unpredictable narrative structures. Installed as sculptural configurations, her paintings reorganize space and continuously regenerate meaning through the viewer’s movement. As she continues to experiment with diverse sites and modalities, Jeon is expected to further extend the narrative and structural boundaries of painting, positioning herself as a vital contributor to the evolution of contemporary art on a global scale.