featured artists
everyday objects, remarkable emotions
Explore a realm of paradox, presence, and painted memory with artist, JaeIn Jung
In a world where everything moves so quickly, artist JaeIn Jung asks us to slow down and look a little closer. Her oil paintings are quiet at first glance, but the more one engages, the more they seem to hum with stories. Candles flicker. Bowls sit still. Emptiness speaks. In JaeIn’s work, everyday objects step into the spotlight, not just as symbols, but as emotional stand-ins for the human experience itself.
At the heart of JaeIn’s practice are candles and bowls; humble, even ordinary objects that transform into philosophical musings on paradox and identity. The candle, burning from within, hints at self-destruction and fleeting existence. The bowl, holding everything and nothing at once, suggests mystery and the ambiguity of emotional containment. For JaeIn, these objects do not simply represent human beings, they become them. Her curiosity about what a person might look like if their conventional form were replaced with that of an everyday object drives the surreal and bodily quality of her work. The result is a visual language that blurs the line between the physical and psychological, the animate and the still.
JaeIn’s paintings are born from a series of strange, beautiful, and even haunting moments. She recalls seeing love bugs flying without direction, the sun cruelly drying earthworms on the road, walking along snowy paths guided only by someone else’s footprints, or moving backward to watch the low moon behind her. These poetic memory fragments serve as emotional snapshots, cross-sections of real life, suspended somewhere between fact and fiction. JaeIn often paints from a sense of disconnection with time, especially when day and night seem to collapse into each other. In these in-between moments, her art finds its rhythm.
JaeIn’s method is slow and intimate. She spreads oil paint over linen with small brushes, allowing pigment to either soak into the fabric like memory or float on the surface like passing thought. This interaction becomes a choreography between control and surrender. The linen itself begins to resemble human skin, and through the accumulation of subtle, searching strokes, she fleshes out her subjects with hints drawn from recollection and instinct. Over time, the canvas becomes more than just a surface; it becomes a body, whole and breathing.
Even when her images lean toward the fictional, JaeIn considers them grounded in truth. Born through observation, her work depicts the ways in which pain, warmth, disillusionment, and distance coexist in our everyday lives. Doing away with spectacle, she draws attention to objects that bear witness to human feeling and passage. She reminds us that even in stillness, something is taking place… even in emptiness, something remains… and sometimes, that something is enough to make us feel whole again.
