금호미술관

Soojung Jung creates paintings that depict unfamiliar yet strangely familiar worlds imagined from real-life events. Drawing on images drawn from diverse temporalities and narratives—such as adventure stories, myths, films, documentaries, and animation—the artist deconstructs and recomposes them into new scenes. Within her canvases, female figures and natural life forms intermingle, unleashing an uncontrollable vitality, as opposing energies collide to produce dynamic landscapes. Drawing actively on the forms and subjects of classical painting, Jung reinterprets the tronie, a genre of character study that flourished in the 17th-century Netherlands, to present universal figures whose identities remain unspecified, leaving only traces of narrative. Within compositions filled with intense color and dense brushwork, the boundaries between figure and background dissolve, expanding into open-ended narratives that resist a single, fixed meaning.
 

The exhibition White Sneakers: Death Is Fine, but Then There Is No Love unfolds around the contrast between the dynamism of life and the stillness of death. Its title is drawn from the film Holy Motors (2013) by Leos Carax; the recognition that certain emotions cannot persist beyond death paradoxically prompts a reconsideration of their meaning while we are still alive. Extending this line of inquiry, Jung interweaves personal experiences of death with events unfolding in contemporary society, constructing scenes in which life and death are inextricably entangled. At the entrance, a painting renders with palpable tension the instinctive movements of animals closely attuned to humans as they sense the approach of death. Nearby, portraits that distill the relationship between humans and animals are presented like a prelude to a larger narrative. At the center of the exhibition stands the monumental painting White Sneakers, spanning ten meters in width. Here, human figures and natural forms press toward one another, poised on the brink of collision, while across the canvas unfold urgent scenes in which life and death intersect. Suspended at the top of the canvas, a pair of white sneakers suggests arrested movement, while also evoking the time that continues for those who remain in the wake of the departed. Rather than positioning death as the antithesis of life, these scenes instead invite it to be understood as another modality of movement operating within life itself. The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the emotions and memories that remain after loss, within the ongoing temporality of life that persists even in the knowledge of its finitude.