Yiji Jeong (b. 1994) captures private and intimate emotions toward those around her, along with a sense of romantic atmosphere and lingering moods, through painting. Her works reflect not only scenes and objects she has directly observed but also thoughts and stories about the people close to her. Rather than placing emphasis on the subjects themselves, her paintings focus on moments of connection and impressions formed within the relationships between herself and those subjects.

Yiji Jeong’s work begins with capturing fleeting, intimate moments through snapshots or drawings. She discovers parts of herself reflected in the inner worlds of those around her, comes to see herself anew through them, and quickly records the fleeting sensation of feeling connected to them.
 
As a result, her paintings often resemble the original snapshots or evoke stills from a coming-of-age film. At the same time, these ephemeral moments are transformed into distinctive painterly experiences on the canvas through her brisk yet decisive and precise brushstrokes.

Yiji Jeong’s first solo exhibition, 《Short Cut》 (Uhjjuhdah GALLERY2, 2019), presented paintings that captured fleeting but intimate emotional moments. Her paintings, often based on happenings in her immediate surroundings, naturally feature young women of her own generation.
 
Rather than idealizing these women or romanticizing youth, Jeong avoids focusing on the direct depiction of the subject. Instead, she selects photographs in which beauty is conveyed through the overall mood of the scene. From there, she carefully crops the image, distinguishing between the atmosphere that evokes the moment and decorative elements that may distract from it.

When translating her images into paintings, Jeong seeks to preserve the subject’s unique impression while avoiding overly detailed depictions that might emphasize appearance alone. She uses simplified coloring to create a balanced harmony between the figure and its surrounding space. At this moment, Jeong fills the canvas with light brushstrokes that appear to have been made in a single breath. Though applied briskly and without hesitation, the brushstrokes carry a certain firmness that resonates with the fleeting, affectionate moments the artist seeks to capture.
 
In her artist’s note, Jeong writes, “I hope each scene can be justified not by verbal reasoning, but through the act of painting itself.” In other words, she paints in a way that allows the necessity of each scene to be expressed through the movement of her brush, the gentle touch on the canvas, and the way diluted pigments bleed or settle—letting the painting speak for itself.

Yiji Jeong’s simplified depictions of figures avoid pinpointing specific individuals, allowing her personal moments to open up to broader interpretations. Though her work begins with private, intimate experiences, the lack of detailed representation invites viewers to imagine a range of relationships and emotional connections.
 
By stepping away from meticulous description, her paintings come to embody not just her own memories, but countless tender stories born within affectionate bonds—subtle yet deeply resonant moments one might wish to hold onto.

Yiji Jeong’s second solo exhibition, 《My Salad Days》, held at Sahng-up Gallery in 2022, presented painterly records of moments in which the artist became both an insider and an observer—digging into the bittersweet memories of her radiant youth.
 
Focusing on the units of time, the exhibition fragmented and selected memories that evoke the most minute particles of time, allowing them to surface through sensory traces. This perspective is most clearly embodied in two monochromatic paintings, to see a world (2021) and In a Grain of Sand (2021), where the titles and the scale of the canvases reflect the artist’s attempt to perceive subjects as particles of time.

In a Grain of Sand was inspired by the opening line of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence (1863): "To see a World in a Grain of Sand." Through this work, the artist reflects herself by using the metaphor of units of time accumulated within a single grain of sand to find meaning in the smallest and most trivial moments of everyday life and translate that into her art.
 
Meanwhile, to see a world, which began as a small framed pencil drawing, captures the forms of light diffused across an expansive nighttime landscape. Unlike her previous landscape works, this piece focuses less on physical scenery and more on the sensory impact of stark contrasts between light and darkness—ephemeral, immaterial forces that shape perception.

Unlike traditional approaches that aim to realistically reproduce a landscape, this expression intentionally omits the usual components of scenery, leaving only abstract forms of shadow and light and a lingering impression of the moment. Furthermore, the darkness rendered in indigo, sepia, and Payne’s gray—deep hues tinged with reddish-brown and violet—thinly layered onto the canvas surface, creates a silhouette of an abstract, ambiguous landscape.

In the portraits presented in 《My Salad Days》, the way subjects and their surroundings are composed on the canvas reflects the artist’s ongoing concerns about how her paintings might continue to be interpreted over time. Until now, Yiji Jeong has developed her paintings either by placing emphasis on the figure itself or by allowing the viewer’s gaze to expand into the unique structures and atmospheres of the places depicted.

Accordingly, the works are restructured in slightly different ways—sometimes internalizing the figure to open up possibilities for the observer, other times emphasizing a more intimate, personal record. Yiji Jeong adopts the narrative technique of the ‘cut’—a method common in comics that captures a scene within a frame—and applies it to her paintings. This encourages viewers to perceive the subject not merely as an isolated figure but as a specific moment or ‘cut’ within a framed situation.
 
The fragmented transmission of time through these ‘cuts’ is presented in a formally deconstructed and condensed manner, clearly revealing a distilled, precise moment. This compressed mode of storytelling invites the viewer to imagine the subject’s state, existence, memories, or what may come next.

Additionally, the artist transforms images of memory using a painterly technique that removes defined borders. The screen, lacking clear outlines and appearing almost taxidermied, opens up possibilities for imagining the fleeting sensations experienced at that moment. In some works, while the figure’s contours are emphasized, the background—whether landscape or still life—is rendered realistically without outlines through shading, creating a sense of dissonance that expresses the sensory moment centered on the figure.
 
In this way, rather than mastering a perfectly polished comic grammar, Yiji Jeong experiments with the raw, unfiltered techniques of amateur comics to convey the emotions and sensations of fleeting, youthful moments—capturing the earnestness and immediacy of that early, unrefined period in life.

In this way, Yiji Jeong has quietly recorded everyday life by observing the accumulation of time in seemingly trivial moments, much like “a grain of sand.” Some of the figures within these works may appear like self-portraits at first glance, but they are actually depictions of people from afar—those whom the artist aspires to resemble.
 
Her earlier records, which cautiously circled around the subjects, reflect the artist’s long-standing struggles and conflicts regarding identity. This thought process of seeing herself reflected in others and wanting to become like them culminated in four portraits shown at the group exhibition 《Ziggy Stardust》 at N/A Gallery in 2022, where she unfolds on the canvas the relational formula of “I am you, and you are me.”

The boldly cropped ‘cut-up’ technique, segmenting the canvas into fragmented moments of time, along with the repetition of the same figure across four canvases of two different sizes, draws the viewer’s focused immersion on the subject. The borrowed cartoon frames and cinematic methods act as devices that evoke the self’s memories and experiences toward the persona, while the artist’s gaze shifts to become an observer outside the frame.
 
Centering on a breakthrough of will directed at herself, the artist—who has carefully chosen, moment by moment, how much of the figure’s surrounding time and space to include—gradually begins to place greater emphasis on the figure itself and expands the spatial context. Through this evolution in her exhibitions, the previously peripheral figure takes center stage, allowing her to confront her own persona more directly.

Yiji Jeong has conveyed her sincere emotions through painterly authenticity on canvas by experimenting boldly with framing and scale. With just a few brushstrokes, her paintings evoke sunlight and shadow, varied textures, the impression of figures, atmosphere, and time of day. Her work captures the joy of discovering tiny grains of sand shining faintly within the repetition of mundane daily life, while also expressing the melancholic emotions of youth.

Composed of multiple fleeting moments, Yiji Jeong’s pictorial world serves as both a record of her life and a process of understanding it. Intimate moments shared with cherished people in ordinary life build up her existence and are carefully documented on canvas, forming a kind of long-form documentary.

 “The private and intimate emotions, romantic atmosphere, and lingering feelings I mainly seek to capture in my paintings come from the deep respect and affection between them and me, as well as our constant struggle to affirm our own existence. Sometimes, when I paint still lifes or landscapes, it is less about the objects themselves and more about how they remind me of certain relationships or specific people.”  (Yiji Jeong, Artist’s Note)

Yiji Jeong graduated with both a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from the Department of Fine Arts at Korea National University of Arts. She has held solo exhibitions including 《My Salad Days》 (Sahng-up Gallery, Seoul, 2022) and 《Short Cut》 (Uhjjuhdah Gallery 2, Seoul, 2019).
 
Her group exhibition participation includes 《Next Painting: As We Are》 (Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《Scent of Soaps》 (Komplex Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《Seize the Moment》 (Noblesse Collection, Seoul, 2023), 《barrr parrr》 (KT&G Sangsangmadang Chuncheon Art Center, Chuncheon, 2023), 《Perigee Winter Show 2022》 (Perigee Gallery, Seoul, 2022), 《The Seasons》 (ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul, 2022), and 《21st Century Paintings》 (HITE Collection, Seoul, 2021), among others.
 
Yiji Jeong has exhibited at art fairs such as The Preview Seoul (2025) and Art Busan (2023), and in 2019, she also published an independent art book titled Piece Pith.

References

• 오브제후드, 정이지 (Objethood, Yiji Jeong)
• 리바트, 반짝이고 서툴렀던 나의 풋내기 시절에게
• 루이즈아트, 《숏 컷》 정이지 개인전, 2019.05.04
• 상업화랑, [서문] My Salad Days (Sahng-up Gallery, [Preface] My Salad Days)
• N/A 갤러리, [서문] Ziggy Stardust (N/A Gallery, [Preface] Ziggy Stardust)
• 국제갤러리, [서문] Next Painting: As We Are (Kukje Gallery, [Preface] Next Painting: As We Are)