Art Basel Hongkong 2023
GALLERY2 is pleased to present “Truly Madly Deeply” series by Hyunsun Jeon(全炫宣), a young Korean painter working primarily in watercolor on canvas. Her works unfold open-ended narratives that integrate all manner of images, from flora and fauna to flattened geometric shapes and three-dimensional objects, giving rise to contextual situations that arise within complex compositions. Jeon’s practice serves as a means of resolving her own questions about painting; she willfully relinquishes predetermined logics of form and function to provoke a relational approach to painterly expression. This ethos extends to her unorthodox proclivities for installing her works, which are manifested in this project for the Discoveries Sector at Art Basel Hong Kong.
Jeon has long sought to break away from conventional presentations of her paintings. Rather than hanging her works at eye level to meet viewers where they stand, she places individual works in idiosyncratic positions in order to redirect the viewer’s gaze and facilitate more engaged encounters with the images she renders. This is fitting, given the complexity of her compositions, which possess neither center nor periphery and are populated by “images that constantly collapse and rise over and over.” Divisions between figure and ground are frequently indistinguishable in Jeon’s works, as are horizon lines and perceptible depths of field—all of which are defining characteristics of the landscape genre. The disorienting distortions of scale that result from such ambiguities permit fluid exchanges between large and small, foreground and background, challenging viewers’ preconceptions of landscape paintings and the types of spaces that they depict.
Jeon’s spatial experiments also transcend the boundaries of individual paintings; since 2021, she has adopted a methodology of combining multiple canvases to form composite networks of paintings. Working without any fixed notion of the final composition, she paints each individual canvas independently and only assembles them as a collective whole after they are all complete. Whether placed side-by-side or arrayed into large-scale grids, these arrangements give rise to unexpected visual correlations, coincidences and incongruities of the “pictorial state created when an image meets another image.”
The thematic link between the canvases presented in “Truly Madly Deeply” derives from Jeon’s ongoing creative interrogation of pictorial narratives that images alone are capable of disclosing. By presenting fifteen discrete spatiotemporal possibilities as mutually ostensible visual realities, Jeon proposes a panoptic simultaneity that words cannot capture.
