Sooim Jeong
About this work
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.
Your Cold Feet, a smaller-scale work of oil on linen, might be called an unconventional portrait. Jeong’s unusual cropping of her subject, centering his feet, is characteristic of her work: by recomposing her subject according to a new, stranger perspective, Jeong omits his identity almost entirely, passing this responsibility, or speculation, onto the viewer. Equally, she refocuses attention on the often-overlooked details of vision and memory - toes, trouser hems, faintly chequered patterns beneath the feet. Like the work’s colour palette, the brushstrokes are minimal; gently, playfully, the image is allowed to speak for itself. There is a sense of affection, too, of intimacy with a person drawn from Jeong’s own life, as her subjects often are.
