Jiyeong: Solo Exhibition

Jiyeong deals with human flaws and traumas — the wounds people would rather not reveal. At times she also speaks of childhood dreams that were lost. Yet she wraps these themes, melancholy and even sorrowful as they can be, in works of art with beautiful surfaces.

In search of a material that could make the wounded figures in her paintings shine — to comfort and hold them — the artist arrived at aluminum. She completes her works by corroding aluminum plates and then painting acrylic over them.

I consider Jiyeong an exceptionally sharp contemporary artist. Facing the psychological wounds we all carry, or the childhood dreams everyone longs for, she seems to see straight through them — "yes, I understand it all" — yet rather than expose them painfully, she wraps them beautifully instead.

On the surface, Jiyeong's work aims for the "flat": simple, familiar forms. But beneath that surface, it strikes sharply at the inner life of the modern person.

In this sense her art is fundamentally pop art, and because her own ideas run so thick through her work, she is also a conceptual artist. What stands out above all, though, is the visual excellence of her art. Even as an idea-driven practice, it never forgets that visual art is, first, visual — and to express this, she chose a material entirely her own, aluminum, exploring and mastering its physical properties. In doing so, she succeeded in creating a new flat-painting form that is unmistakably, clearly her own.

— Gyuhyun Lee, director of E&Art