JANG SOYOUN

When Did Nature Become Artificial?

장소연, 부레옥잠, 97 x162.2cm, oil on canvas, 2024

In the context of modern urban environments, the nature we encounter is increasingly being replaced by “constructed nature.” From street trees and apartment gardens to parks, botanical gardens, zoos, and aquariums, urban landscapes are carefully designed to appear natural. For generations raised within such environments, nature has already been internalized as a staged and curated scene. It is from this point of reflection that Jang Soyoun’s work begins.

장소연, 숨청사초, 72.7 x 116.8 cm, oil on canvas, 2022

Growing up in an urban setting, the artist came to a realization that the landscapes she once accepted as nature were, in fact, artificially constructed. This awareness expanded into a fundamental question: What do we call nature? This question became the driving force behind her observations and painterly practice. The natural forms she encountered in her daily life were captured with a renewed sense of estrangement. In particular, irregular and non-uniform shapes of grass and branches she observed while visiting a family gravesite with her parents became a recurring motif in her work.

장소연, 빕새꼬리선인장, 162.2 x 130.3 cm, oil on canvas, 2024

The artist collects these botanical forms and organizes them into what she describes as a “pictorial herbarium.” Rather than relying on scientific classification or botanical taxonomy, this herbarium is fluidly reconstructed through layers of sensory experience and personal memory. The masking technique employed throughout her process transcends mere representation. Through selective concealment and emphasis, the artist repetitively applies choices and omissions on the canvas, producing fragmented images that are compositionally layered and rearranged. This process of cutting and recomposing generates a visual rhythm, dismantles the fixed boundaries of representation, and establishes painterly devices that create sensory gaps and multiple layers of perception.

장소연, Acacia Nurses, 45.5 x 33.4 cm, oil on canvas, 2024

In this way, the completed herbarium is not an accumulation of scientific data, but rather a visual archive composed of the rhythms of sensation and memory. At the same time, it raises a critical inquiry into today’s artificial nature, quietly contemplating how human beings design, control, and construct nature itself.

장소연, 가는막대지기, 162.2 x 130.3 cm, oil on canvas, 2025

The exhibition Herbarium presents an accumulation of Jang Soyoun’s sensory reflections on nature—a painterly exploration that evokes a sense of estrangement within familiar landscapes. Through this herbarium, viewers are invited to reconsider the boundaries of nature as a concept and to reflect on the frameworks through which we perceive it.

Gallery Imazoo
Seoul, Gangnam-gu, Teheran-ro 20-gil,12, B1
+82 02 557 1950

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