k-art in Munich
Step into the messy, beautiful collage that is Haena Jung’s inner world.
For some, Munich emits an emotional void that deters any true sense of belonging. As an Art Therapy major, Haena Jung survived here in a state of exhausting in-betweenness.
Working in clinical settings, Haena bore witness to the emotional baggage of strangers one moment, only to establish distance and intervene strategically the next. She was asked to look, to feel, and to filter everything through the sieve of her own fragile experience. She was told to package it all up into a clear, concise institutional report.
To cope with this overload, she began to draw in a private, journal-esque fashion. In these pages, she preserved brushes with humanity that threatened to dissolve in the sterile Bavarian air. Pencil markings and ink lines offered sanctuary, enabling Haena to process the dizzying complexities of vicarious trauma at a safer distance. She also transported this work to the AkademieGalerie floor, shattering professional boundaries and letting her vulnerabilities cross over into the public sphere.
Haena’s recent works are intense yet strangely beautiful re-enactments of client-based encounters. They are inherently unstable, often carrying and buckling under the burden of psychological excess. For clarity, she cuts out specific sections and figures from these drawings, breaking down the visual narratives she just created. As if rebuilding a home post-storm, she then reorganizes the severed fragments into new compositions that seesaw between total disarray and momentary reprieve.
There are no convenient resolutions here. In fact, Haena’s healing is not the absence of pain, nor is it the total erasure of the scars she bears. Instead, her restoration takes place on the messy collage stage, where viewers can recognize their own broken pieces, and find comfort in the knowledge that they are not alone, and that they too are finally being seen.
