Hyunjeong Lim paints the invisible landscapes of the mind. She takes fragments of emotions, memories, and events from lived experience, blends them with imagination, and rearranges them on the picture plane. The starting point is “intuitive drawing”\u2014creating images by following the movement of the hand. She calls the world completed in this way an “archive of the mind”: not an orderly record, but a fluid space continually rewoven according to the logic of emotion, association, and dreams.<\/p>\n
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Lim graduated from the Department of Painting at Seoul National University’s College of Fine Arts and earned an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London. She has since developed a painting practice grounded in drawing while moving between Seoul, London, and the western United States. She has held solo exhibitions at the OCI Museum of Art and Atelier Aki in Seoul, and has continued to present solo shows abroad in cities including Seattle, San Francisco, and London. In 2026, she received the Greg Kucera & Larry Yocom Fellowship from Artist Trust in the United States, and she has completed residencies at the Nanji Residency of the Seoul Museum of Art and the OCI Residency.<\/p>\n
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Her work begins with drawing. Whether in oil or in pen, every painting starts from drawing by hand. She first lays down a background of diluted acrylic wash on paper or canvas, then builds up forms with lines in pen, ink, and pastel pencil, before layering oil paint on top to develop color and texture. A distinctive feature of her process is that she works without a preliminary sketch. Starting from a form such as a tree or a rock, she lets the landscape grow as her hand moves. In this way, photographs collected on her phone and forms that surface by chance during the process converge on a single picture plane, growing into unfamiliar presences like unidentifiable life-forms. The artist describes this drawing as “a process of discovering images I had not yet known.”<\/p>\n
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Lim’s work took a decisive turn after she moved to the western United States in 2018. During her years in London, she had been immersed in the imagination-filled landscapes of Northern Renaissance masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. When she later stood in Yosemite, in the desert terrain of Bryce Canyon, and along the Pacific coast, the landscapes she had once painted only in her imagination\u2014like those of an alien planet\u2014unfolded before her eyes. She describes it as “an experience of encountering in reality a world I had only ever painted through imagination.” This experience became the catalyst for weaving together landscapes from art history and the actual natural world.<\/p>\n
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At this year’s Kiaf, Lim presents recent works drawn from her travels through the American West. At the center of the booth hangs her representative work Bryce Point, flanked by pen-and-ink drawings on paper and oil paintings. Beginning from Bryce Canyon in Utah, the painting borrows the bird’s-eye perspective of Mongyudowondo (Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land), the classical Korean landscape painting, guiding the viewer’s eye to move through the image as if traveling within it. The artist hopes that viewers will “discover something of their own” in the painting. Standing before it, each viewer follows walking fish or hidden creatures rather than a fixed answer, arriving at a story of their own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"template":"","categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62462","highlight","type-highlight","status-publish","hentry"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.0","language":"en","enabled_languages":["ko","en"],"languages":{"ko":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"acf":{"\bshow_only_admin":false,"thumbnail":62469,"gallery":"ATELIER AKI","hide_han":false,"hide_eng":false,"artworks":[{"artwork_img":62500,"artwork_desc":"Balancing Rock, Acrylic, oil on canvas, 91.4\u00d760.9 cm, 2025"},{"artwork_img":62501,"artwork_desc":"Bryce Point, Acrylic, oil on canvas, 101.6\u00d7228.6 cm, 2024"},{"artwork_img":62502,"artwork_desc":"North Window, Acrylic, oil on canvas, 91.4\u00d760.9 cm, 2025"},{"artwork_img":62503,"artwork_desc":"Peekaboo Loop, Acrylic, oil on canvas, 60.9\u00d760.9 cm, 2023"},{"artwork_img":62504,"artwork_desc":"Red Dirt Waterfall, Acrylic, oil on canvas, 91.4\u00d760.9 cm, 2025"}],"category":[111]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/highlight\/62462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/highlight"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/highlight"}],"acf:term":[{"embeddable":true,"taxonomy":"category","href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}