Sooim Jeong gathers diverse memories and symbols, and recomposes them on the canvas. With a colour palette that is delicate, sensitive and sometimes spare, she creates oil paintings that play with composition and metaphor; with minimal brushstrokes, she relocates human figures in remembered and imagined spaces, often patterning and deidentifying her subject matter in the process. Through these re-compositions, she creates new perspectives: treating and merging the major and mundane without distinction, her works gesture at how the happy, ordinary, tragic and brutal are all rendered gentler, more distant, by memory and time.  

In Behind the Tree, a work of oil on canvas, Jeong characteristically plays with composition, altered and fragmented like memory itself. Characteristically, her human figures are rendered with minimal brushstrokes and limited colour, cropped and disembodied. As Jeong notes, what we expect to hold significance is not always what centres in our minds. The pair’s identity is lost to the foregrounded branches, contrasting with a strong tonal, textural intensity, adorned with ropes of comparatively vibrant colour, intertwining organic and artificial forms. A puff of smoke, resembling for Jeong both a speech bubble and the act of remembering itself, at once draws attention to our search for meaning in the work, and the reticence of memory that Behind the Tree evokes: amorphous, transient, strange and incomplete.

Sooim Jeong

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Sooim Jeong

London

Newcastle