Full description from the venue
LINA GALLERY Seoul presents Jeon AHyun’s solo exhibition, 餘在 : What Remains. Jeon Ah-hyun has developed a distinctive visual language by combining painting, sculpture, and functional structures. In this exhibition, she further expands the visual grammar she has developed over the years, focusing on *Deep Mountain* (Sim-san, 深山), a series that has long been central to her practice. Emerging from traditional East Asian landscape painting, the series translates landscapes where mountains and mist overlap from the two-dimensional plane into three-dimensional forms. These landscapes have taken various forms, from individual works to installations that expand throughout the exhibition space.
The *Deep Mountain* series, which began in 2019, was inspired by a moment the artist experienced while climbing a mountain. Mist rose between layers of mountain ranges, obscuring the mountains before drifting away and revealing the landscape once again. This changing landscape remained in her memory as a sensation that was both comforting and unfamiliar. The movement of nature—of things that pass and flow—resembles the changing contours of human life. Seeking to capture this fleeting movement, the artist has continued to experiment with materials and methods of fabrication, translating the flow of mist into three-dimensional forms.
The artist’s approach to landscape also reflects her background in furniture design. Her works establish a direct relationship with the viewer’s body, functioning as a medium of communication. For Jeon Ah-hyun, furniture is an object that gains meaning through touch, use, and physical interaction. As one touches, sits, and lingers, the distance between the body and the work narrows, allowing the landscape to become an embodied experience. The stools and tables that appeared in earlier works likewise conveyed the sense of comfort and solace the artist experienced in the mountains.
In this exhibition, the *Deep Mountain* series undergoes two significant transformations. First, the landscape becomes more fluid. While earlier works depicted mist resting within the mountains, the new works suggest mist in motion, with mountains of different scales connecting and overlapping to form a continuous landscape. Years of research into materials and fabrication have enabled the artist to express a sense of movement within fixed material forms.
The second transformation concerns the viewer’s gaze. Whereas earlier furniture-based works naturally directed the gaze downward, the new works take on more sculptural forms and rise to eye level. Their appearance changes according to their scale, placement, height, and the viewer’s movement through the space. No longer defined by function, they now stand as independent landscapes—sculptures experienced through a shifting gaze.
Landscape does more than reproduce nature; it reflects a changing world and the passage of human time. Seasons pass over mountains, light filters through, and mist descends. What Jeon Ah-hyun seeks to capture are the fleeting moments revealed within these changes. By bringing the sense of solace she experienced in the mountains into the interior space, she has repeatedly reconstructed and accumulated a single landscape in search of a form that might resonate with others. The time accumulated through this process remains within the overlapping mountains and flowing mist of the works presented here.
The title *餘在 : What Remains* refers to that which remains and continues to exist. What has passed does not necessarily disappear completely; like mountains revealed once the mist has moved on, traces remain after change. Within the repetition of what disappears and remains, what is obscured and revealed, Jeon AHyun’s work invites us to look simultaneously at the time we have passed through and the time that still lies ahead.