JEON SOYOUNG KOREA, b. 1984

The Landscape of Contact

Jeon Soyoung (artist)

Is it possible to fully understand a subject and the landscape formed by it? For a long time, I have questioned the conditions of seeing. Looking does not remain a visual act of receiving form and color. Different senses—surface, temperature, the density of light, the humidity and smell of the air—overlap through time and constitute an experience of place. Landscape is not a fixed image, but a field where sensation, memory, and time intersect.

This awareness became more concrete after I left Seoul and began living closer to nature. Walking the same paths each day and repeatedly encountering the same streams and plants, I experienced the boundary between the observing subject and the observed gradually dissolving. I came to feel that I was not simply looking at a particular place, but passing through time together with it.

My paintings do not seek to reproduce landscape, but to construct traces of sensations accumulated through being there. I call this a “tactile visuality.” Although I perceive the world through sight, I want the surface of the painting to be experienced as something to touch, trace, and read. Layers of paint that overlap, blur, and seep into one another, together with the materiality of the surface, retain the time and sensations of contact with the landscape as physical traces.

My gaze is drawn primarily to the edges of streams and to plants growing in tangled, interwoven forms, with water being of particular importance. Water simultaneously reveals surface and depth, light and shadow, flow and stillness, continually absorbing the traces of time and its surroundings. Through its fluidity and its capacity to cross boundaries, I approach nature not as an object, but as a field of relations.

I make contact with the world between sight and touch, and translate the traces of that contact onto the surface of painting. For me, landscape is less an object to be represented than a sensory field through which I seek to understand myself as a being living in relation to the world, to others, and to forms of life beyond the human.