Jung Yeob JUNG

Jung Jung Yeob is an artist who paints beans and red beans on canvas. Through this, she shows the story and the crisis along with the threats faced by life forms that coexist with us, such as grains, bugs, and edible plants. It is women’s labor which provides a foundation for all this. Along with her painting, Jung also engages in performance art and artistic activism.

Jung, who is widely recognized in the art world, has been practicing painting for over 30 years after graduating from Ewha Women’s University Department of Western Painting. She received the Goam Art & Culture Foundation Award in 2018, the Gender Equality Award for people in the field of culture who have contributed to gender equality in 2020, and the Lee Jung-seob Art Prize in 2022. Her works are in the collections of renowned institutions both home and abroad, such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

“Beans are moving dots that can express everything,” says Jung. She dabs the brush covered in pigment on the canvas and wipes it with oil, repeating the process dozens of times. The rubbing and smearing process creates a three-dimensional effect. Instead of the usual method of applying bright paint to create the 3-dimensional effect, Jung erases what she has already painted with oil, creating blank space to bring the work to life. Her works are both figurative and abstract. She paints each bean and red bean as figurative paintings, but when one looks at the canvas as a whole, it becomes an abstract or semi-abstract work.

Jung, who paints yellow beans, black beans, mung beans, peas, red beans, and more, says, “Legumes show all the light and color of the earth. They are not philosophical, conceptual colors, but colors that are eaten and become flesh and blood.” Jung is praised for revealing the sublimity of life and removing a layer of prejudice by highlighting women’s domestic work, which has long been considered insignificant, and bugs, which are hated for no reason.

Jung describes the work she will be exhibiting at Kiaf SEOUL 2023 HIGHLIGHT as “a work where the most detailed grains of beans gather and disperse, where everyday life and imagination meet,” adding, “I feel primal pleasure from delicate and dense drawing.”

Although she is known for her laborious hours in front of the canvas, Jung does not say it fatigues her. “Every job is hard,” she says, “and there’s something that drives me to do it that I cannot resist.” Her goal is to create work that satisfies herself. “So many lives on Earth are facing a crisis. I’m afraid of humanity’s insatiable appetites, which are leading us to collective extinction. All I can do is caress these delicate and soft beings.”

Apart from the sense of mission and crisis that she puts in work, Jung says she “wants the audience to feel joy and freedom” in her work, adding, “I want it to be a festival of the joy and pain of art, and if people can have a beer and relax as they view the works, that’s even better.”

(Exhibition View)