Heekyoung Jeon

Installation View (1)

SARAHCROWN is pleased to announce Heekyoung Jeon: Soundings of Blue, the South Korean artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery and her US debut. Featuring a body of new works created in 2025 alongside a selection from the past year, the exhibition invites viewers into Jeon’s deeply intuitive and ocean-inspired visual world, engagement with nature, the senses, and the emotional landscape of color.

Heekyoung Jeon, 2025, Delightful Aura of Blue, Acrylic on Canvas, 116.8.5x91cm. Courtesy SARAHCROWN

Based in Seoul, Jeon’s recent works have been profoundly shaped by her time immersed in the natural environments of South Korea—particularly during artist residencies on Jeju Island and in Shinan’s Jeungdo. These experiences inspired her to deepen her engagement with the rhythms of nature, the sensory presence of water, and the ancestral traditions of the island—most notably the legacy of the Haenyeo, Jeju’s famed women free-divers who harvest the ocean’s depths without oxygen tanks. The exhibition’s title, Soundings of Blue, evokes this act of measuring depth—both literal and metaphorical. Her compositions echo the movement of waterfalls, oceans, and shifting atmospheres but also emotional and intuitive mappings of interior landscapes.

Heekyoung Jeon, 2025, The Scene Brimming with Horizons, Acrylic on Canvas, 72.7×60.6cm. Courtesy SARAHCROWN

Her lively sceneries are made of fluid brushwork, intricate details, and a palette dominated by shades of blue—ranging from viridian to cobalt, Prussian blue, and indigo. Blue, for Jeon, is far more than a color: it is an emotional register, a state of being, a space of reflection. It expresses the invisible—the humidity in the air, the motion of wind, and the feeling of sinking into the deep sea.

Heekyoung Jeon, 2025, White Holding a Drop of Blue, Acrylic on Canvas, 145.5×112.1cm. Courtesy SARAHCRONW

“That sensation of sinking,” she notes, “is like entering a state of deep focus where I come face to face with myself. It’s an inward moment that aligns with the stillness found in the vacuum of the universe.”

Installation View (2)

Clement Greenberg argued that Abstract Expressionism fell short of fully exploring the potential of color and flatness. In contrast, Heekyoung Jeon’s canvases focus on creating psychological spaces and painterly dimensions, achieving a sense of completeness in color. Her works, while dense in imagery and conceptual expression, retain traces of landscapes.

Installation View (3)

This debut solo exhibition in the U.S. is an invitation to pause, breathe, and enter Jeon’s fluid worlds—where boundaries dissolve, and painting becomes a form of listening, sensing, and returning to something essential. This exhibition is co-organized with director Grace Minkyung Bak, director of A-Lens (Seoul, KR)

SARAHCROWN
373 Broadway #215 New York, NY 10013.
+1 347-393-4911

WEB  INSTAGRAM  ARTSY