Sungwon Jung: Solo Exhibition

I want to give visual form to a dream world built on fantastical scenery and sensibility, so I paint pictures that warm the heart of anyone who sees them. When people encounter my work, I hope they come away feeling that utopia doesn't exist only in dreams and ideals — that a happy ideal realm can also exist in reality. Building on earlier series such as "Antic and Applower" and "Antic and Rabbit, Animals," my recent work "Antic and Eternal Return" carries forward the idea of "eternal recurrence" onto the canvas once again. It reflects my belief that the spiritual experience of paradise — of an ideal realm — need not be deferred to the afterlife, but can be experienced as one's own utopia in this life.

The recent series of visual fantasies I've painted grew out of the foreign skies, cathedrals, and garden-like spaces I encountered anew on a European trip in the winter of 2012, taken around a residency in Paris. Carrying those unforgettable, treasured memories with me, I composed distinctive backdrops that lead the viewer into a new space, and let gentle animals settle onto the canvas so that pure sensibility could come fully alive there. After painting the colors of sky and wind in smooth, pastel-toned brushstrokes, I let animals that, to me, embody pure happiness coexist within them, conjuring an intoxicating landscape. In other works, I tell stories that unfold in a mysterious forest — staging a passage that leads into a hidden world, capturing the moment a secret door opens and everything glimmers like a diamond. Through these works I mean to stir and enchant the viewer's reverie, unleashing a force that draws them into a purely dreamlike world.

Calling myself "an artist who dreams of happiness and... paints happiness," I bring the dreams of my childhood and the objects of longing buried deep within me fully onto the canvas, without holding anything back. I believe people are good by nature, and I keep asking myself how true happiness can be found. Remembering a childhood in which a single apple was enough for happiness and the scent of a flower alone brought sweetness to the heart, I quietly let my work carry the wish never to forget that beautiful sensibility.

Even though the dreamlike illusions I set down on canvas are unreal, my paintings form an idealized world and space that comforts and immerses the viewer in happiness. Over the years, thinking about what true happiness really is, I have created hundreds of paintings and sculptural explorations. At times I have known both hope and disappointment within the ideal realm I dream of, yet my longing for utopia has continually surfaced in my work. In the works still to come, one may find a warm encounter in a heavenly forest... In a fairy-tale landscape, people can freely and naturally revive their childhood memories and their pure longing for an ideal realm. And the world of my paintings will offer a warm resonance to modern people who, amid daily life, too easily forget their wish for communication, healing, happiness, and purity.