Details of Orange Manoeuvre, 2019 - a painting by Sooim Jeong. Stylised hands tessalate across the canvas, each holding and offering an orange. The painting uses calligraphic brush work and a balance of muted colours with a more vibrant orange. 

Orange Manoeuvre, 2019 is a painting by Sooim Jeong. Stylised hands tessalate across the canvas, each holding and offering an orange. The painting uses calligraphic brush work and a balance of muted colours with a more vibrant orange. 

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.  

Orange Manoeuvre is a smaller-scale oil painting on linen. Jeong’s material, here, is centred on two favourite motifs: fragmented human body parts and citrus fruits. Three stylised palms, each hold out an orange; their repetition and composition resemble a kind of patterning, a playful gesture at the abstract and surreal. Jeong, fundamentally concerned with memory, orients the scene around an otherwise trivial action, the passing of fruit – imbuing it with a new, indeterminate intensity and resonance, echoed in the vibrancy of the orange paint. Balancing the composition, puffs of smoke and rough markings themselves resemble memories to Jeong – amorphous, transient, strange and incomplete.

Sooim Jeong

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Sooim Jeong