Contact gallery@winstonwachter.com for more information
Throughout her career, Hyunjeong Lim has been interested in the elusive nature of unconscious memories and the ways imagined worlds can emerge from fragments of everyday experience. During her MA studies in London, a fascination with Renaissance masters, particularly the surreal figures and densely populated compositions of Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch, deepened her interest in landscape as a reflection of the inner world.
Lim's Korean heritage provides another important foundation. In the Korean painting tradition of Sansuhwa, or “mountain and water painting,” landscape can serve as a means of envisioning an ideal world. Drawing on this tradition, Lim constructs panoramic compositions that are neither entirely observed nor entirely imagined. Instead, they become psychological landscapes in which disparate locations, memories, and moments unfold simultaneously.
Within these expansive worlds, fragments collected from daily life and travel appear almost like clues (an abandoned sofa, an orange traffic cone, a fleeting figure lost in a crowd). These elements are placed alongside one another intuitively, creating unexpected relationships and allowing the painting itself to become a process of discovery.
A significant shift in the artist’s practice occurred after moving to the United States. The vast landscapes of the West Coast and its national parks had a profound impact, offering an unexpected encounter between imagination and physical reality. Environments that might once have existed only within the artist’s imagined mindscapes began to appear in the world around them.
“Though I sometimes felt like an outsider moving between foreign cities, the sublime nature here helped ground me as an artist,” Lim reflects. “It became a way of contemplating surreal landscapes both internally and in reality.”
At the heart of the Hyunjeong's work is the idea of the archive of the mind. Rather than preserving memories chronologically or as fixed records of the past, Hyunjeong collects and continually reconfigures fragments through the perspective of the present. Personal memories mingle with archetypes; past encounters meet present observations; reality dissolves into fantasy.
“I invite viewers to walk through these works as if traveling inside the painting,” the artist says, “discovering their own meanings along the way.” - Hyunjeong Lim
