KIM Eun Jeong

《Sub, text》 Installation View

Hakgojae Gallery is pleased to present KIM Eun Jeong (b. 1986)’s solo exhibition, sub, text, from October 2nd (Thu) to November 8th (Sat). This marks her second solo exhibition at the gallery featuring more than 40 paintings.

KIM Eun Jeong explores the subtle threshold that can neither be fully articulated in language nor completely captured in image. She has developed a unique visual vocabulary that embodies sensation and thought, imagination and emotion through the medium of painting. Her works are not reduced to fixed forms or a single narrative. Instead, they reveal the very process of layering and unfolding over time. The exhibition highlights these processes, exploring how the space between language and sensation and reality and imagination can be perceived and reflected upon.

김은정 KIM Eun Jeong, 빨래 The Laundry, 2025, 캔버스에 유채 Oil on canvas, 259.1×193.9cm

KIM’s practice often begins with natural phenomena such as weather. Wind, clouds, sunlight, and rain appear not merely as conditions of landscape but as symbolic devices that metaphorize the uncertainty and fluidity of life. Within these ever-changing expressions of nature, she discerns traces of human emotions, events, and everyday life, reconfiguring them into a painterly language.

While her canvases carry fiction and imagination that extend beyond reality, they are grounded in moments she has directly witnessed and experienced. These specific experiences expand into the realm of imagination through layers of metaphor and narrative, only to reconnect with reality in a cyclical structure. This becomes her methodology for visualizing the essence of painting: the liminal space where reality and imagination intersect.

김은정 KIM Eun Jeong, 손과 부리가 자라는 숲 Forest of Growing Hands and Beaks, 2025, 캔버스에 유채 Oil on canvas, 259.1×193.9cm

The exhibition title, sub, text, alludes to the gap created by a comma and a space. The distance between language and image, explanation and sensation, is not a rupture but arises within a tense interplay where each reflects and complements the other.

KIM employs the languages of painting, printmaking, and editorial design, constructing canvases where heterogeneous mediums collide and resonate. This approach seeks to transcend the material and visual language of traditional painting, stemming from an experimental attitude that both acknowledges the limits of a medium and strives to expand its boundaries.

Her work unfolds like a monologue, where landscapes long held in memory resurface as afterimages across the canvas. These scenes do not remain as a coherent narrative. Through repeated overlaps and accumulations, they form new networks of pictorial relations. The traces that remain on the canvas carry both contingency and inevitability, sometimes emerging as broken branches, fleeting figures, or the forms of animals and plants. These become metaphors for the conditions of existence within shifting environments, functioning as sensorial resonances that evoke particular emotions and relationships.

김은정 KIM Eun Jeong, 고래 나무 물사슴 Whale Tree Gorani, 2025, 캔버스에 유채 Oil on canvas, 259.1×387.8cm

The artist states, “Before stepping into the logical realm of ‘words’, before seeking to understand or explain, I try to uncover ways of perceiving—ways of being—through ‘painting’”. Her work can thus be understood as an attempt to capture sensations and states of being prior to their fixation in names or concepts. Far from images for simple sensory consumption, they invite viewers to encounter the works through both thought and perception.

김은정 KIM Eun Jeong, 부리 물고기 뿌리 Beak Fish Root, 2024, 나무에 배접된 종이에 유채,한지 Oil on paper mounted on wood, Hanji, 182×350.4cm

Ultimately, the exhibition raises a fundamental question of change and identity: “What remains unchanged amid the process of change?” This recalls the ancient paradox of the Ship of Theseus, prompting reflection on persistence, identity, and the nature of transformation.

KIM’s practice is a continuous inquiry into what to reveal and what to omit. What is excluded is not mere absence; rather, it operates like a resonance on unseen levels, generating ripples across the entire work. What is erased and what remains coexist within a network of meaning, allowing her painting to resist singular interpretation and instead form layered sensibilities.

김은정 KIM Eun Jeong, 한강의 초록비 Green Rain over the Han River, 2024, 캔버스에 유채 Oil on canvas, 193.9×224.2cm

Her work dwells in the spaces between the “drawn” and the “undrawn”, inside and outside the frame, and between language and image. KIM turns her gaze toward these intervals, where visual narrative and conceptual reflection converge. Rather than presenting a single subject or definitive story, she highlights the gaps, pauses, and uncertainties embedded in her work. Tracing these gaps, viewers encounter the conditions of perception and existence—layers where change and continuity, reality and imagination intersect.

In the end, sub, text is both “speaking through painting” and a pursuit of the “painting beyond words.” It recalls the fundamental challenges contemporary painting continues to face, and in doing so, expands the horizon of its pictorial language.

 

Hakgojae Gallery
50, Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul
+82-2-720-1524

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