Our Story, acrylic on canvas, 126x126cm, 2025
The Sacred & the Profane: Radiant Ecstasy
OMAE Gallery is pleased to present The Sacred & the Profane: Radiant Ecstasy, a solo exhibition by artist Mi-yeon Jung, on view from September 16 to October 2, 2025. This exhibition revisits one of the most enduring themes in both art and religion—the tension between the sacred and the profane—asking anew, within the realities of our time, what kind of light illuminates the human condition.
Jung’s works resist reducing the sacred and the profane to a simple opposition. Instead, they explore the luminous moments that emerge when boundaries collapse and worlds intersect—between Buddhism and Catholicism, tradition and contemporaneity. In her compositions, the ten disciples of Seokguram appear alongside female nude croquis; Buddhist symbols are transposed into Catholic contexts; and the interplay of blue and gold unfolds as a metaphor for the relationship between divinity and humanity. For the artist, the nude is not merely a drawing of the human body but the most direct and beautiful form of truth revealed in human existence.
For many years, Jung has explored the intersection of faith and art as a painter of Catholic icons. Through her iconography—published in the Archdiocese of Seoul Weekly Bulletin and integrated into church commissions—she has sought to create what she calls “paintings that strike the heart,” capturing the vitality of lived spiritual experience. In this exhibition, she extends that journey by bringing together the Buddhist legacy of her hometown Gyeongju with her Catholic faith, re-examining the sacred and the profane on an existential level.
As religious historian Mircea Eliade once wrote, “The sacred reveals itself through the profane, and in that moment, objects and places acquire an entirely different dimension.” Likewise, Jung reveals the radiant light of being that emerges where the sacred and the profane converge. More than an art exhibition, The Sacred & the Profane invites each viewer to discover new meaning in these dualities within their own lives, and to share in the radiant ecstasy that arises from that encounter.