Soojung Jung 정수정 Torch Lily 토치 릴리, 2025

Torch Lily blends the symbolic order of traditional still life painting, mannerist distortion, and personal sentiment to forge an inner landscape. Lights more brilliant than those of reality and trembling objects colliding like animate bodies express the turmoil of surreal emotions rather than the cool arrangement characteristic of traditional still life paintings. The work’s affective charge is neither rooted in myth, nor in religion, but in the embodied experience of a female, artist in her thirties navigating Korea's competitive society. Broken shells, falling petals, and birds with sharp beaks evoke the violence and tension inherent to survival in competitive structures. The hand clutching a flower on the left side of the canvas reads as the female artist's declaration that she will not relinquish her vitality and desire even if she must endure emotional repression and instability. Perhaps this work can be described as a landscape visualizing the deep inner world of a female artist striving to rebuild herself despite oppressive conditions.