Hyunsun Jeon
Hyunsun Jeon was born in 1989 in Seoul. She received her BFA and MFA in painting from Ewha Womans University in 2014 and 2018. The artist lives and works in Jeju.
The artist was one of three finalists for the Jean-François Prat prize in Paris in 2024. She has been awarded and selected for the 20th Song Eun Art Award, Song Eun Art and Cultural Foundation (2020), Chong Kun Dang Fine Arts Prize (2017), ARKO Artist Curator Workshop (2015), 37th JoongAng Fine Art Prize, JoongAng Ilbo (2015), 99°C Promising Art Support Program, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (2014), Sangsangmadang Membership Card Artwork Proposal: Art in Your Pocket, KT&G (2013), and Seoul Digital University Art Prize (2013).
Hyunsun Jeon has invented a unique pictorial language that employs a chromatic palette predominated by greens, blacks, and blues. Her expansive vocabulary of proportion—some simplified passages for example relate to pixelation in early video games—is suspended between symbolic geometry and suggestive landscape conveying an impending sense of poetic absence and artificial presence.
Developing a characteristic approach to the medium, Jeon’s early work combined the use of traditional Korean pigment and paint suspended in contemporary acrylic polymer to create a variety of distinct surface textures. Her recent work has explored the medium of watercolor on canvas to build images slowly with small brushstrokes, allowing layers and objects to blend into each other yet yield a flat surface. The geometric forms in her paintings are often echoed in the three-dimensional structures in which she stages her works.
In 2025, Hyunsun Jeon was chosen for a commission for the Hermès showcase in Seoul (The Forest of Drawing, curated by Hye Jo Yum and Karlee Han).
The artist’s exhibitions include: Colors of Korea, Korean Cultural Center, Paris (2025); Color, Shape and Active Audience, Gyeongnam Art Museum, Changwon (2024); When you understand my secret, it becomes a ghost, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2024); Dui Jip Ki, Esther Schipper, Berlin and Seoul (2023); The 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale THIS TOO, IS A MAP, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2023); The Moments We Encounter, Suwon Ipark Museum of Art, Suwon (2022); ARTSPECTRUM2022, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2022); Meet Me in the Middle, Gallery2, Seoul (2022); Hay in a Needle Stack, Korean Cultural Center in Hong Kong, Hong Kong (2021); The 20th Song Eun Art Award Exhibition, Song Eun Art Space, Seoul (2020); Hotel Express, Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul (2020); The adventures of Korean painting: I will go away all by myself, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Cheongju (2019); 6th Chong Kun Dang Fine Arts Prize Exhibition, Sejong Center, Seoul (2019); Red Green Corners, P21, Seoul (2019); BOTANICA, Busan Museum of Art, Busan (2018); Parallel Paths, Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul (2018); Of Nature, Suwon Ipark Museum of Art, Suwon (2018); Forests and Swamps, Weekend, Seoul (2017); The Cone and Conversations, Place MAK, Seoul (2015), and the 37th Joongang Fine art Prize Exhibition, Hangaram Design Museum, Seoul (2015).
The artist’s work is held in collections including: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, and Suwon Ipark Museum of Art, Suwon.