Byungkoo Jeon 전병구 Home Sweet Home 온기, 2025

The cardboard box can serve as a metaphor for various aspects of modern life. It is a symbol of modern consumer society, the reliance on deliveries which proliferated worldwide during the pandemic, and the everyday isolation endured during lockdown. In the case of Jeon’s painting, the cardboard box reads as both a discarded object and a trace of solitary, isolated life in an urban setting. The ashen-gray painting is devoid of warmth; its surface, rendered with a uniform texture as if a brush were swept across the whole canvas, blurs distinctions between the box and its surroundings. Moreover, the box's creased folds resemble the lines on the wall between rows of stone, making the construction appear as someone's makeshift shelter. Or perhaps all this is a metaphor pointing out that the object exists outside of our gaze. Yet the boxes, erected like windbreaks, block a diagonal structure from forming across the screen and force our gaze inward. It is as if they are commanding us to remember what the present era has concealed, or what it has passed by.