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Hyebin Jeon
USA
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"I am not trying to stop time. I am trying to notice it while it passes."
Hyebin Jeon is a Korean artist whose paintings and drawings are concerned with memory, sensation, and the passage of time. Working in oil, charcoal, pencil, ink, and soft pastel, she makes images that do not attempt to reproduce a moment as it happened but to hold what the body felt while it was happening. Her subjects range from the human figure and the self to remembered places and everyday objects, and her surfaces are built slowly, in layers that carry the trace of every hour spent on them. For Jeon, a painting is never only the picture a viewer sees. It is also the time it took to make, and in that sense each work becomes a small piece of the life that produced it. She does not paint to stop time. She paints to notice it passing.
The Unconscious | Oil
NFS
65" x 45"
In this work, I turn inward, using the self as a subject of exploration. Rather than depicting a defined identity, I explore the subconscious urges and memories that shape who I am. Through color, gesture, and abstraction, I visualize aspects of my personality that cannot be expressed through language. The painting becomes a space where conscious and unconscious experiences interact, revealing hidden facets of my identity.
Everyone carries memories that bring joy and memories that bring regret, and no one can record all of them. Jeon's practice begins from the recognition that art can preserve some part of what would otherwise fade. Her journey as an artist was first prompted by the urge to hold on to certain events and emotions, encounters with other people that she knew would eventually slip from her memory if she did not give them form. Rather than resisting the flow of time or wishing to control it, she has come to see something beautiful in allowing time to take its course and making art in response. Each painting is a way of marking that something happened, that it mattered, and that it has already begun to recede. The making itself is her answer to impermanence.
Passion | Oil
NFS
40" x 30"
The intense red shapes represent primitive, visceral desires hidden beneath consciousness. Rather than depicting a specific object, jagged abstract forms express emotions as they emerge from the subconscious. Layers of red suggest how memories and emotions accumulate over time. Rough, energetic brushstrokes convey both vulnerability and passion, while leaving the work open for viewers to connect with their own experiences.
"The charcoal has opinions about where it wants to go, and I have learned to listen."
Sensation is where the work starts. Jeon draws her inspiration from bodily feelings experienced at particular moments, and the five senses of sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste become references for the colors and shapes she chooses. Instead of trying to reconstruct a memory as it looked, she tries to translate the physical and emotional texture of it into visual form, so that what reaches the surface is closer to how the moment was felt than to how it appeared. In order to hold these moments before they are lost, she has been investigating memorable locations, the human body, and ordinary objects, moving between brush, pencil, and charcoal as the feeling requires. Oil painting is one of several means through which she expresses herself, and she chooses among them according to what each memory seems to ask for rather than by habit.
The Garden After The Storm | Oil
NFS
48" x 35"
Through this piece, the artist reflects on the psychological effects of the violation or suppression of one's “inner garden,” a safe haven of personal beauty and vulnerability. The storm symbolizes not only destruction but also transformation, suggesting that both elements may exist together in one place. By externalizing this internal experience onto the canvas, the painting becomes a mirror in which one can project one's own inner turmoil.
Materials are treated as collaborators rather than tools. Jeon works with common, everyday means, paintbrushes, pencils, charcoal, oil, ink, pastel, and even masking tape, and she deliberately avoids imposing an arbitrary method on the process of expression. The materials are allowed to become part of how a work comes into being, resisting in some places and yielding in others. It is through this negotiation, through the act of working with a substance and discovering what it will and will not do, that she continues to uncover her own aesthetic sensibilities. Experimenting with different materials is not a preliminary stage but an integral part of understanding how memory and feeling can be turned into an image at all. Each new surface teaches her something about what she is trying to say.
The mirage is an image that exists on the verge of appearing and disappearing. Trembling, unstable, and unfinished forms convey a reality that is constantly changing and impossible to grasp. This work explores the fleeting nature of perception and memory, where reality can be both tangible and ambiguous. Through layered color, blurred forms, and surface movement, I capture a moment between reality and memory.
Mirage | Oil
NFS
65" x 45"
"A memory can reach me by any of the senses, not only the eyes. However it arrives, that is what I turn into color and shape. Showing what a moment looked like does not interest me. I want the body's version, what it was like to be there."
"People look at a finished painting and see one picture. I look at the same painting and see all the days that went into it. Each mark holds something of how I felt when I made it, and none of that goes away once the work is done. It stays inside, whether anyone can see it or not. So to me a canvas is far more than an image. It is a piece of my own living, set down and kept. I have stopped wanting to hold time still. It cannot be done, and the wish only gets in the way. Instead I let the hours go by, and I make something while they do, and that making is how I honor the life moving through me. A viewer will never know what happened in the studio. They will only see the result. But if they give the work a little of their own attention in return, then something has been exchanged, and that is enough."
Landscape | Oil
NFS
65" x 135"
This work explores beauty and self-representation in contemporary society, focusing on how self-image and identity are constructed. Rather than presenting a fixed sense of self, I examine how beauty ideals are formed, embodied, and internalized. I use myself as both subject and object to explore the gap between self-perception and how others perceive me. The work remains open to viewers' emotions and memories.
Time, for Jeon, is the true medium beneath all the others. She perceives painting as the accumulation of time: a work consists not only of the image finally presented to a viewer but of the hours, days, and weeks it took to make. Every line, color, gesture, and layer may carry a mark of the experience and emotion she brought to it on that particular day. Seen this way, a painting is not merely an illustration of a moment but a portion of the artist's life, pressed into a surface and left there. The viewer encounters a finished image. The artist knows what went into it, the hours of looking and adjusting, the emotion carried to the surface on each day of its making. All of that remains in the work, whether or not it can be seen.
Precious | Oil
NFS
65" x 45"
This work captures the fleeting and fragile moment of looking into the eyes of someone deeply important to us. Through a fluid composition, I transform feelings of intimacy into colors and forms. Contrasts evoke love, desire, and the urge to protect someone precious. Rather than depicting a specific person, I focus on emotions rooted in intimacy, memory, and desire, inviting viewers to connect the work with someone meaningful in their own lives.
Standing in front of a work by Nam June Paik reshaped how she understood this. At an exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea, she encountered Life Has Clockwork, and the piece brought the connection between art, time, and death into sharp focus. Even Paik, a master of media art who could make machines move and screens flicker to his design, had no way of going back into the past or defeating time. The clockwork could move objects physically. It could not touch the process of a human life, which runs in one direction only. The realization was not bleak to her. It clarified what art could and could not do, and it made the work feel more necessary, not less.
“To Her” is an encouraging piece dedicated to a woman who keeps moving forward despite hardship and uncertainty. Rather than portraying a specific person or telling a fixed story, the work expresses the emotions of perseverance. Through light colors, layering, and expressive gestures, I convey both weariness and the will to continue. The painting also expresses compassion for those who quietly endure their struggles.
To Her | Oil
NFS
48" x 35"
Art, she came to believe, is fundamentally linked to the practice of adoring life. It is a method of creating an imprint even of experiences that cannot possibly be retrieved, because it captures moments that are transient by nature and gives them a place to remain. Through painting, Jeon does not seek to freeze time. She appreciates its passage and records the sentiments that come with it, the tenderness and the ache and the ordinary warmth of a day that will not come again. Her work becomes, in this light, a celebration of the preciousness of individual moments, a way of saying that a single afternoon or a single glance was worth the hours it took to honor it. The trace is small. The gesture behind it is not.
"Paik could make a machine move anything he wanted, and still he could not make one day of my life run backward."
Her recent paintings turn this attention inward. In several works she uses herself as the subject of exploration, not to depict a fixed identity but to visualize the subconscious urges and memories that shape it, the aspects of personality that cannot be put into language. Jagged fields of intense red stand for primitive, visceral desires beneath consciousness, their layered surfaces suggesting how emotion and memory pile up over time. A storm breaks over an inner garden, that private place of beauty and vulnerability, and carries both destruction and transformation at once. A mirage trembles between appearing and disappearing, its unfinished forms conveying a reality that cannot quite be grasped. And in a study of beauty and self-representation, she examines the distance between how she sees herself and how others see her.
Knot of Sorrow | Oil
NFS
48" x 35"
“Knot of Sorrow” explores how difficult emotions can be translated through painting. The “knot” represents sorrow, worry, frustration, and repressed memories that become tangled within us. Through layered colors, strokes, and textures, I visualize how these emotions form and evolve. Painting becomes a way to confront and transform emotional pain, turning sorrow from something painful into a source of reflection.
Intimacy and endurance run through the rest of the body of work. One painting holds the fragile instant of looking into the eyes of someone deeply important, transforming that closeness into fluid color and form without depicting any particular face. To Her is dedicated to a woman who keeps moving forward through hardship, its light colors and layered gestures carrying both weariness and resolve. Knot of Sorrow gives visible shape to grief, worry, and repressed memory tangled together, and to the way painting can turn pain into reflection. After the Rain, made with ink, soft pastel, and masking tape, records a quiet pause after movement has passed. And a work she has chosen to leave untitled, in ink, charcoal, and soft pastel on Japanese Asara Kusui paper, is a gesture of gratitude toward the people who have shaped her life.
“After the Rain” captures a quiet moment of pause and renewal after the rain has passed. Repeated marks and layered gestures reflect the rhythm of everyday life while suggesting moments of rest within its continuous flow. Using ink, soft pastel, and masking tape, I create a surface where traces accumulate and overlap, evoking the calm, lingering feeling that remains after a period of movement or change.
After The Rain | Mixed Media
NFS
25" x 39"
Painting, for Jeon, is finally a process through which she explores and embraces memory and uncertainty, a place where experience is permitted to evolve and change rather than stay fixed. She approaches every piece as a chance to try something new, to challenge herself and to search for fresh ways of communicating sensation visually. In essence, her practice is a sustained inquiry into time and into how experience is altered by it. She does not intend, through making art, to halt the passage of time. She intends to meet it, to feel it move, and to leave behind a surface that shows it did. Her paintings ask nothing more of a viewer than a moment's attention, which is, after all, the very thing they are made of.
Untitled | Mixed Media
NFS
29" x 22"
“Untitled” is a gesture of gratitude toward the people who have shaped and supported me throughout my life. Without assigning a specific title, I leave the work open to personal interpretation. Made with ink, charcoal, and soft pastel on Japanese Asara Kusui paper, the work reflects the traces of relationships, memories, and emotions that have become part of who I am.
"When I paint myself, the question is never who I am. It is whatever I have not yet found the words for."
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