Summer Remains

Workplace is pleased to present Summer Remains, a solo exhibition of new paintings by London based artist Sooim Jeong. The artist’s first exhibition at Workplace since joining the gallery earlier this year, continues Jeong’s exploration of perceived reality and personal memory.

The artist’s practice draws upon a wide spectrum of experiences, from the profound weight of tragic loss to mundane and seemingly trivial interactions with strangers. With a restrained and sensitive colour palette and minimal calligraphic brushstrokes, she constructs playful compositions. Jeong’s approach is informed learning traditional calligraphy as a teenager in Korea. Bringing together disparate fragments of scattered past and more recent memories, Jeong recomposes these into images within the confined space of the canvas.

Created during the summer months, Jeong’s latest work embodies a deep reflection on past memories or, as she refers to them, ‘remains’ which have surfaced in her mind during this period. Jeong describes these as ‘the things left in my head, after the rest has evaporated away’. Her paintings are infused with raw and profound emotions, encapsulating the experience of confronting these memories. Throughout this introspective process, Jeong highlights the enduring imprints of the summer within her work.

Jeong repeatedly incorporates familiar imagery into her paintings such as shirts, mittens, and vases, each holding a distinct and singular meaning. Objects that make insignificant appearances in her memory, become the focus - and the only clear detail she can recall. Returning to her stylistic motifs - depictions of verdant foliage, orange fruit, and forms of smoke, drizzle, and haze - she delicately infuses her canvas with a whimsical, cartoon-like charm, influenced by her physical surroundings and experience of living close to Greenwich Park in Southeast London.

The work in the exhibition can be thought as a visual diary or record, as Jeong juggles both symbolic and metaphorical images, positioning the large and small events of her life side by side to be acknowledged with equal perspective and without distinction. As Jeong explains, this process provides her relief from angst, and simultaneously, a greater sense of trepidation at the nihilistic loss of meaning that this might imply.