Sooim Jeong

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.

I Am Hiding But I Can See You, a smaller-scale work of oil on canvas, is an unconventional portrait. Playfully inverting expectations, its subject’s disembodied head is faintly, minimally rendered, portrayed with Jeong’s characteristic reticence: intentionally withholding information from the viewer, she instead foregrounds tree branches, giving greater attention and tonal, textural intensity to their surface, and the ways that they intersect with the subject, holding her strangely within them. I Am Hiding’s composition and form speak to Jeong’s preoccupation with the strangeness of memory and ordinary vision, often faint or vibrant, distant or foregrounded, trivial or profound, where we least expect it.