Before and After, 130cmx130cm, Acrylic, crystal and Mother of Pearl on Canvas, 2019

Hyun-sook Jeong is an artist who has continuously expanded the definition of painting through the use of luminous materials such as mother-of-pearl and crystal. These materials transcend mere ornamentation, embracing the perceptual, sensory, spiritual, and structural questions of contemporary art. This exhibition offers a diachronic perspective on her two-decade-long exploration of “painting with light,” “painting as object,” and “painting as perception.”

Spanning from her formal experiments of the 2000s to her recent monochromatic minimalism, this exhibition chronologically presents how the traditional material of mother-of-pearl has been used to construct temporal layers. It is not merely a record of one artist’s trajectory, but a rigorous inquiry traversing tradition and modernity, craft and fine art, modernism and the postmodern era.