Hyunsun Jeon’s paintings convey a synthesis of the linguistic and nonlinguistic by exploring the ways such categorizations are blurred, and questioning notions of authority implied by a dominant language, definition, or borderline. Populating her panoramic canvases are fragmented scenes that adopt contrasting perspectives and juxtapose various geometric shapes and everyday objects. Although such elements rendered in multiple color spectrums may suggest particular landscapes or natural phenomena, they do so via a language of abstraction that intentionally evades any singularpoint of reference and instead delicately taps into several overlapping ones. The resulting works attempt to recover memories from fragments that point to the fractured and nonlinear nature of history and life itself. In Cross My Borderline, Jeon’s new installation at SMB12, recurring motifs of geometric green and brown shapes are scattered across multiple canvases that constitute a single largescale image, each positioned such that they overlap and divide as a means of invoking natural entities such as mountains and trees. Implicating a longstanding pictorial and scientific history of landscapes as backdrops or static entities, Jeon’s paintings embody an outlook that interprets territory as an animateand mutable organism which exceedss rational imperatives, anchoring them in time and space through a combination of painting and mapping.
