Jeong’s abstract landscapes, where new complexity appears under a bigger context reminiscent of leaves or feathers, are build upon the concept of “Kyung.” In Asian culture, “Kyung” refers to landscape as well as an arena of harmony in which opposing concepts develop to forge a symbiotic relationship. That’s why we can see the traces and scars of the struggles caused by conflicts between soft and hard as well as between order and chaos. Based on Asian values which define relations in reference to or “within” overall phenomena, the artist focuses on the structure of symbiosis among opposing factors. And it is “Kyung,” a beautiful phenomenon of nature, that links Jeong’s artwork to architectural forms. For example, Jeong’s leaf motif, which implies “the collision between nature and culture as well as the East and the West,” heads towards the path of harmony by repeating organic forms within geometric, architectural forms. Furthermore, the artist constructs thousands of leaves, feathers, scales, and armors under this solid structure set up by herself.
Since Jeong attempts to project the concept of “Kyung” onto cities, natural landscape factors seem to build a single idea. A city, a geometric space, built with patterns between natural objects and artificial buildings, itself is an experimental space to examine the image of symbiosis. Cities, filled with energy trying to achieve harmony with humans, are the basis of Jeong’s abstracts alongside the concept “Kyung.” Influenced by Marcel Proust who believed an individual’s salvation is possible through the encounter with objects carrying the individual’s memory, Jeong has chosen cityscape, an object engraved with collective memories and something that has been there along with the long history of humanity, as the foundation of her paintings. Such memories come together to create a huge image group, something that acts like a live breathing creature.
Joined by the power of life, the power of abstraction where material details combine and cross over like the warp and weft leads to contemplation of different relationships. There is me wanting to go off. But at the same time, there is also me wanting to stay. There are things you want to own and things you cannot. Such clashes, contradictions, and discords are a continuum of conflicts, bitter but naturally inherent to humans, and resolutions. Maybe we are seeing the executional conflicts the artist went through while working as a professional artist in a foreign country as well as her countless promises made to herself oozing out of the city life.
Jeong Yun-kyung’s work got the most influence from architect Paolo Soleri, who coined the term “Arcology” referring to a city of the future. This is a city based on ecology, which dreams of organically conjoining humans, cities, nature, and technology all together. It is an eco-city re-designed vertically on wasteland, a city combining everything that utilizes technology in a positive way. In addition, it’s a city that assumes a far far-away future we can never reach in whatever state, putting no limit on creatures that can exist there.
Jeong’s fifteen paintings displayed at Gallery Koo plainly describe the traits of such ideal eco-city. Continuous contraction and expansion is going on without any disorder of any element, sometimes like an urban skyscraper soaring into the sky or sometimes revealing rhythmical details within a geometric structure. Though the directions of each element cannot always correspond, when looking at Jeong’s abstracts, we come to believe even the resulting discords and conflicts will ultimately be embraced by the artist’s ideal world that will come true some day.