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 Synchronised, three pairs of feet appear or disappear beneath waves, as three heads pass faintly behind a background wall. Jeong’s pared-back, blueish colour palette has the character of faded, dreamlike memories, half-called back to the conscious mind and the canvas. The human figures and their chequered backdrop, characteristically cropped and incomplete, are playfully patterned through repetitions and minimal brushstrokes – treading the line between the remembered and the purely, surreally and amusingly imagined realms.

A cropped image of a painting by Sooim Jeong: Synchronised, 2019 Oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm

Exhibition Feature Image

Installation shots of 'Decoy' - a group exhibition of painting and sculpture at Workplace | Newcastle - including artwork by Cristian Avram, Eric Bainbridge, Simeon Barclay, Rachel Lancaster, Sooim Jeong and Miko Veldkamp

Sooim Jeong

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Sooim Jeong

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