The solo exhibitionใArchive of the Mind: Pacific Crossingใby artist Hyunjeong Lim, on view from August 28 to October 4 at ATELIER AKI, was featured in the exhibition page of @news1korea. Our sincere thanks to journalist Jeonghan Kim for the article.ย
This exhibition delves into the pictorial journey of Hyunjeong Lim (b. 1987), an artist exploring contemporary landscape aesthetics. It highlights how her life experiences and inner transformationsโaccumulated while crossing the Pacific Oceanโunfold into boundless landscapes and transcendental spaces on canvas.ย
โThis exhibition does not present a static repository of memories but reveals Hyunjeong Limโs ever-expanding โlandscapes of the heart.โ It is an exploration of how true communication can emerge through painting at the intersection of life and art, reality and imagination, self and others.โ / Via #News1 #JeonghanKim
Exhibition view : Hyunjeong Lim Solo Show <Trip West> , Gallery 4Culture, Seattle 2025
Otherworldly Detail: Inย Trip West, Hyunjeong Lim sets the scene for extraordinary stories
Hyunjeong Lim never imagined sheโd live in the United States. But when her husband got a tech job here in 2018, she suddenly found herself in San Francisco, some 5,600 miles from her home in Busan, South Korea. Right away, the couple set about exploring their new home on a series of road tripsโand discovered a California landscape that felt very foreign.
โIt was really magicalโthe sunshine and palm trees,โ she says. โOutside of San Francisco, itโs so dry and sunny that itโs like an alien environment to me.โ
Lim had been painting โrealistic, imaginary worlds of the mindโ since working on her MFA in London at Central Saint Martins more than a decade ago. But in California, the color and tone of her paintings began to change. โWhat affects my work most is really the nature and the climate environment around me,โ she says.
Then the pandemic hit, and Lim was confined to her apartment. โThe depths of my painting, the amount of detail or the time I put in increased a lot,โ she says. โI felt like, if I make this painting more realistically or with more abundant details, I could feel like Iโm in the outside world, traveling through nature all over again. Foliage, leaves, grasses, treesโI just gave extra, more.โ
With her husband able to work remotely, he and Lim decided to seek out a more familiar setting, and wound up in Seattle. โIt has four seasons, lots of mountains and forests, so itโs very similar to Korea,โ she says.
Again, they hit the road.
In time, Lim had visited many of the most celebrated sites in the Western United States: Yosemite, the Oregon Coast, the Olympic Peninsula, the canyons, Utah, even Hawaii. These experiences became the material for her current Gallery 4Culture exhibition,ย Trip West, a collection of 31 surrealistic landscape paintings inspired by the places sheโs been and the people sheโs seen on her travels. Made using oil and acrylic paints, they include individual smaller paintings as well as diptychs, triptychs, and various combinations thereof.
Lim has been exploring this kind of imagery all her life. As a child, she spent a lot of time drawing things like mushroom houses and forest creatures. While in London, she returned to the National Gallery again and again to study the works of Renaissance masters, which she loves.
โThe layering of thin, sparkling oil colors to build the landscape with tiny brush strokesโit really gives me a lot of joy to just to look at it,โ she says of the Flemish paintings that live large in her mind.
When making one of her paintings, Lim synthesizes Renaissance influences with elements of Chinese or Korean screen painting and the idealized landscapes they present. She composes her works through a combination of compositional sketches and spontaneous, intuitive drawing, using her own photos as references and drawing on her own fragmented memories.
The paintings inย Trip Westย not only contain worlds within worlds individually, their juxtapositions conjure even more imaginary places, which is why Lim labors over the way theyโre arranged, using her computer to puzzle them together. Paintings may depict far away locations, but โput together, they make another context,โ she says, explaining that she sees herself as the conductor of an orchestra. โLike, this painting makes pop sound and another one makes a bass tone.โ
Though thereโs a lot going on in each piece, Lim says she doesnโt have a specific narrative in mind for any of them. She leaves that for each viewer to fill in themselves, hoping the imagery will trigger their memories of the places theyโve visited in their own lives. โI really believe that strangersโeach of usโcould slightly understand each other better because we are looking at the same things,โ she says.
โSleeping in a tent is kind of a luxury to Koreans. We make a pastime of going to a camp site and enjoying nature,โ Lim says. In contrast, in cities on the West Coast today, tents can indicate homelessness. โThose simple drawing can tell the different story to each viewer depending on where theyโre from.โ
For viewers at Gallery 4Culture, the scenes inย Trip Westmay be full of familiar locations. But how might audiences elsewhere respond to them? Lim will find out this fall when she shows these works again as part of a solo show in Seoul. She laughs, โWhen I show my photos of these places to my friends in Korea, theyโre like,ย whereย have youย been?โ
photo credit : Joe Freeman (https://www.joefreemanjunior.com)
Trip Westย allures us into an elaborate world of fantastical creatures and imaginary environments where unconscious memories, surreal landscapes, and individual experiences coincide. The exhibition title draws from one of Hyunjeong Limโs recent paintings, a representation of her journey along the vast West Coast, following her move from South Korea to the United States in 2018.
The grand nature of our regionโs national parks impacted Lim, sparking a dialogue between her imagined mindscapes and the living landscapes of the real world. In these highly detailed allegories of explorationโinspired by and paying playful homage to Renaissance masters like Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Boschโwalking fish and faceless beings obscure the line between the mythical and the tangible. As Lim navigated her new life in the U.S., moving between cities, she often felt like an outsider. Yet the sublime and overwhelming beauty of the West Coastโs natural environments rooted her as an artist and shaped this body of work: a series of fragmented images that weave together past and present, fiction, and reality.
Lim aims to provide a visual language that encourages viewers to consider their own emotional landscapes and engage with her paintings as portals into alternative worlds. By combining historical painting traditions with her own fabricated worlds, Lim offers a unique perspective on the possibilities of shared understanding.ย Trip Westย is a universal invitation to connect and contemplate the intricate layers of memory, response, and place
Influenced by her journey from South Korea to the United States, Hyunjeong Limโs surrealistic landscape paintings blend personal and cultura
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