Jeongeun Han

Foundry Seoul is pleased to present Vanishing Point, a solo exhibition by Seoul-based artist Jeongeun Han. In her paintings, Han takes elements on the cusp of dissipation and in constant fluctuation, such as ice, water, fire, and light, as means to capture disappearance and loss. Vanishing Point presents the artist’s painterly reflections on the slow dissolution of monumental forms and their lingering emotional resonance, and how she unravels the tension drawn between the desire to commemorate something and the gradual fading away of memory itself.

This exhibition begins by asking: “What is remembered once the memorial is gone, and what emotion must be preserved?” Even if the physical form is altered or evaporates, Han hopes that the wishes and memories it embodied will endure and focuses on what remains after the tangible form has vanished. However, in place of rendering the emotions themselves, Han seeks to materialize the visual structures that evoke those emotions in the image alone.

Light functions as more than a mere visual effect in Han’s work; it delineates the traces left where presence and emotion once resided. Thin layers laid across the canvas are built up by the passing of the airbrush, revealing the evanescent nature of feeling while simultaneously embodying the desire to catch hold of the shy, ephemeral moment. The resulting composition allows the invisible time and emotion to last another breath longer upon its surface—such an approach arises from a deliberate focus on ‘[what] slowly fades,’ and is by nature against the rapid, indiscriminate consumption characteristic of contemporary visual culture. Her work does not stop at superficial representation, but celebrates existence itself, embraces the process of dissolution, and acts as a practice of reviving resonances once left behind.

Han’s paintings press onward to embrace the sublimity found in the fleeting moment, a stance aligned with the effort to capture presence and absence as we perceive them within a finite world, together with the compulsion that flows in between them. Vanishing Point, rather than pursuing eternal forms, highlights Han’s intent to seek new meaning within the vestiges of disappearance and loss.

Jeongeun Han (b. 1998) is currently based in Seoul, South Korea. She graduated with a BFA in Painting from Sejong University and received her MFA in Korean Painting from the same institution. Han captures the emotional resonances and residue arising from the disappearance and loss of existence, explores their meaning, and expresses them in her own unique painterly language. Major solo exhibitions include Jeongeun Han (A.Single.Piece., Sydney, 2024); Like a Flame (The Necessaries, Seoul, 2024); I Hope That Sparkle Lasts Forever (Art Soombi, Seoul, 2023); Index: Ignition Point (mueumsanbang, Seoul, 2022). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions such as Day & Night (3Q, Seoul, 2024) and Encounter (Gallery Playlist, Busan, 2024), among others. In 2023, Han was selected for 사이 [Sai], an emerging artists’ program supported by the Eunpyeong Foundation for Arts and Culture (Seoul, South Korea).