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 Pink Night Orange, a work of oil on linen, Jeong returns to two favourite motifs: incomplete human heads and citrus fruit. Playfully inverting expectations through colour, the oranges’ background presence is intensified, while the foregrounded figures are pared back. Washed out, cropped and minimally rendered, the pair’s identity is characteristically obscured, left open to the viewer. This sense of mystification, like the compositional imbalance between the figures and the fruit, speaks to Jeong’s preoccupation with memory and its irrational strangeness – often faint or vibrant, trivial or profound, where we least expect it. As she notes, what we expect to hold significance is not always what centres in our minds.

Sooim Jeong

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Sooim Jeong

London

Newcastle