Jeon Hyunsun: Our Eyelids Are More Than a Layer
The eyelid is a membrane is a threshold between the world and the self, serving to mediate rather than separate. If our eyelids are more than a bifurcating layer, where does that thought lead us? We overlook what lies before us, even with eyes wide open. When we close our eyes, we conjure, recall, or imagine scenes beyond our immediate sight. Our Eyelids Are More Than a Layer orbits these multifaceted modes of seeing and explores time as it overlaps, refracts, and fragments.
As disparate images and methods brush against and entangle one another in Jeon Hyunsun’s works, they eventually converge within a single visual field. That is, even as its parts remain sharply defined, the resulting image remains ambiguous in its entirety. This ambiguity mirrors our own circling and drifting passage through the world.
The exhibition unfolds as a layered meditation on life, the world, and the surface of painting. Instead of delivering fixed or categorical meanings, Jeon Hyunsun’s paintings unfold multilayered possibilities, much like parallel universes. Just as the notion that eyelids are more than a layer suggests, her canvases resist being flattened into a single narrative or flow. They ripple and fuzz with stories that diverge, overlap, and defy any singular scheme.
Jeon habitually juxtaposes figures, geometric forms, objects, and patterns across broad expanses of the picture plane. These images, dispersed across the surface, pulse with their own motion and seek ways to coexist. Sometimes they collide, sometimes they slip past one another, but always they negotiate space. Planes-as-parts continuously encounter and jostle across the visual field. This dynamic sustains a sense of wholeness that is always in flux.
Her approach springs from a lifelong acuity, awareness, and appreciation of flatness, a visual instinct shaped by the layered, hybrid environments of her childhood. Early-2000s graphics poised between 2D and 3D, origami paper, double-sided colored paper, cross-stitch, the vertical and horizontal scaffolding of canvas, and the paradox of three-dimensionality approaching flatness all inform her sensibility.
For Jeon, painting begins by probing what lies beyond a discrete and singular world and by imagining other possibilities just out of sight. We live on a timeline shaped through the continuum of our choices, but other lives—those of alternate choices—branch and spiral elsewhere as alternate selves. A perennially popular cinematic plot device, it is also a sustaining counterpoint to blind certainty, a consolation that lets us inhabit the present, and a force that draws us toward other horizons.
Her paintings cleave and extend boundaries in ever-shifting, fluid ways. Within works where patterns and pixel structures intersect, all objects emerge as signs that compose the scene from the margins rather than the center. Long cylinders, reminiscent of monocular telescopes, double as self-portraits and as gazes cast beyond the image. Canvases, panes of glass, and frames become phantom portals that summon worlds outside the window. Grid-based forms, echoing the physical structure of painting, evoke the mechanics of weaving, the tactility of craft, and the ghostly afterimage of digital interfaces. All of these elements remind us that Jeon’s images are shaped by memory, the movement of hands, and the shifting distance of the gaze.
This layered sensibility radiates outward and animates the spatial dimension of Jeon Hyunsun’s exhibitions. Fabric-covered columnar forms, separate from the paintings and scattered throughout the exhibition space, greet visitors with a range of expressions. Faces with eyes—open or lcosed—are caught mid-blink. The artist’s conjured troup of hand-sewn dolls materialize flattened images as tactile presences. These objects embody the flow that traverses and links the realms of life and art, extending the planar logic of the paintings into lived space. Meanwhile, paintings of cylinders, cones, and cubes metaphorically ground her practice and offer glimpses into why she continually returns to painting.
Jeon’s works feature recurring forms and structures. Each time, they are refracted through subtly different approaches or juxtaposed with varied techniques. The works begin to mirror and correspond, generating a sense of resonance and reflection. And as this mutual inquiry deepens, the further it is to escape and closer it is to the orbit of in-between spaces. The belief that our eyelids are not singular, however fragile or uncertain, becomes the very point of departure for all this contemplation.
Jeon’s narrative resists definitive statements or conclusions. Instead, it dwells in minor narratives that refuse to resolve, in open layers, and in the coexistence of overlap and fragmentation. We stand before a single visual field, yet within it, we encounter multiple branching worlds at once. Life may not be a single straight line but a circuit, constantly branching, returning, and repeating itself. On the thin, translucent boundary of the world, like the membrane of an eyelid, we wander and question endlessly. Is what we see ever truly singular? And if so, is that singularity ever the whole?
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The eyelid is a membrane is a threshold between the world and the self, serving to mediate rather than separate. If our eyelids are more than a bifurcating layer, where does that thought lead us? We overlook what lies before us, even with eyes wide open. When we close our eyes, we conjure, recall, or imagine scenes beyond our immediate sight. Our Eyelids Are More Than a Layer orbits these multifaceted modes of seeing and explores time as it overlaps, refracts, and fragments.
As disparate images and methods brush against and entangle one another in Jeon Hyunsun’s works, they eventually converge within a single visual field. That is, even as its parts remain sharply defined, the resulting image remains ambiguous in its entirety. This ambiguity mirrors our own circling and drifting passage through the world.
The exhibition unfolds as a layered meditation on life, the world, and the surface of painting. Instead of delivering fixed or categorical meanings, Jeon Hyunsun’s paintings unfold multilayered possibilities, much like parallel universes. Just as the notion that eyelids are more than a layer suggests, her canvases resist being flattened into a single narrative or flow. They ripple and fuzz with stories that diverge, overlap, and defy any singular scheme.
Jeon habitually juxtaposes figures, geometric forms, objects, and patterns across broad expanses of the picture plane. These images, dispersed across the surface, pulse with their own motion and seek ways to coexist. Sometimes they collide, sometimes they slip past one another, but always they negotiate space. Planes-as-parts continuously encounter and jostle across the visual field. This dynamic sustains a sense of wholeness that is always in flux.
Her approach springs from a lifelong acuity, awareness, and appreciation of flatness, a visual instinct shaped by the layered, hybrid environments of her childhood. Early-2000s graphics poised between 2D and 3D, origami paper, double-sided colored paper, cross-stitch, the vertical and horizontal scaffolding of canvas, and the paradox of three-dimensionality approaching flatness all inform her sensibility.
For Jeon, painting begins by probing what lies beyond a discrete and singular world and by imagining other possibilities just out of sight. We live on a timeline shaped through the continuum of our choices, but other lives—those of alternate choices—branch and spiral elsewhere as alternate selves. A perennially popular cinematic plot device, it is also a sustaining counterpoint to blind certainty, a consolation that lets us inhabit the present, and a force that draws us toward other horizons.
Her paintings cleave and extend boundaries in ever-shifting, fluid ways. Within works where patterns and pixel structures intersect, all objects emerge as signs that compose the scene from the margins rather than the center. Long cylinders, reminiscent of monocular telescopes, double as self-portraits and as gazes cast beyond the image. Canvases, panes of glass, and frames become phantom portals that summon worlds outside the window. Grid-based forms, echoing the physical structure of painting, evoke the mechanics of weaving, the tactility of craft, and the ghostly afterimage of digital interfaces. All of these elements remind us that Jeon’s images are shaped by memory, the movement of hands, and the shifting distance of the gaze.
This layered sensibility radiates outward and animates the spatial dimension of Jeon Hyunsun’s exhibitions. Fabric-covered columnar forms, separate from the paintings and scattered throughout the exhibition space, greet visitors with a range of expressions. Faces with eyes—open or lcosed—are caught mid-blink. The artist’s conjured troup of hand-sewn dolls materialize flattened images as tactile presences. These objects embody the flow that traverses and links the realms of life and art, extending the planar logic of the paintings into lived space. Meanwhile, paintings of cylinders, cones, and cubes metaphorically ground her practice and offer glimpses into why she continually returns to painting.
Jeon’s works feature recurring forms and structures. Each time, they are refracted through subtly different approaches or juxtaposed with varied techniques. The works begin to mirror and correspond, generating a sense of resonance and reflection. And as this mutual inquiry deepens, the further it is to escape and closer it is to the orbit of in-between spaces. The belief that our eyelids are not singular, however fragile or uncertain, becomes the very point of departure for all this contemplation.
Jeon’s narrative resists definitive statements or conclusions. Instead, it dwells in minor narratives that refuse to resolve, in open layers, and in the coexistence of overlap and fragmentation. We stand before a single visual field, yet within it, we encounter multiple branching worlds at once. Life may not be a single straight line but a circuit, constantly branching, returning, and repeating itself. On the thin, translucent boundary of the world, like the membrane of an eyelid, we wander and question endlessly. Is what we see ever truly singular? And if so, is that singularity ever the whole?
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