How can I make you see it as a mountain?
Chaerin Yoo, Curator

The brush no longer simply transfers shapes onto paper. What remains on the surface is not a mere form or color, but the fleeting instant of the gesture, the rhythm carried through the fingertips. Jina Jung’s work unfolds in this way: a visible shape is present, yet its completion is sustained by an invisible energy. It is perhaps a sense of form that only reveals itself after a long, patient gaze.

Her solo exhibition Forms in Sequence brings together three bodies of work — Landscape Elements, Notes on a Scene, and Forms in Sequence — each seeking to capture that sensation differently. In her hands, color and monochrome, surface and volume, control and chance converge, drawing us into a moment where the word “landscape” itself comes to feel unfamiliar. Among these, Landscape Elements has been ongoing since 2023 as an attempt to capture the mutable qualities of nature. Curves, hues, and rhythmic forms layered on canvas do not point to any specific object, yet they evoke the depth of a mountain, the lightness of a cloud, the vitality of fruit. Crossing the boundary of perception, Jung's paintings inquire the question almost whimsically: how much does it resemble a mountain for it to be seen as a mountain? This question opens a gap between what is visible and what we believe we see, dismantling than reassembling the structure of landscape. Rather than replicate appearances, her work traces the perceptual conditions through which “nature” itself takes shape.

Such an inquiry is inseparable from the artist’s background rooted in East Asian Painting (Dongyanghwa)[1] and the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Alongside her paintings, she has digitally explored the elements that make landscapes perceptible. The perspective of East Asian Painting, unlike the single-point of perspective in Western tradition, moves whilst embracing temporality—establishing a relationship with its subject. As a digital native, Jung has translated this temporality into digital environments, seeking alternative ways of seeing. In digital binary systems, recognition arises by assembling images captured from multiple directions. The resulting “computer vision” is not bound to a single viewpoint; it produces either the simultaneous presence of every angle or, paradoxically, the absence of vision altogether. As perspectives proliferate without limit, images once barred from traditional canvas are reassembled within the digital realm. Once gathered, these scenes and perceptions adopt the artist’s distinctive palette then re-emerge on the canvas as newly composed landscapes.

Another axis of the exhibition begins with the deliberate removal of color. Given that her bold, sensitive use of color has been one of her most striking strengths, this is less a change in medium than a challenge to the foundations of her practice. In Notes on a Scene (2025), she lays aside her pigments and works instead with graphite — lines and planes stacked with quiet patience. Where color once shimmered, movement and empty space now command attention, conveying a vivid sense of energy. For Jung, landscape is not a decorative spectacle but a layering of gaze, memory, and cultural experience. The gray strata of graphite are her way of approaching this essence. If her colored works expanded perception into multiplicity, the graphite works reduce it to structure and frame, urging us to rebuild the landscape from its origin. Tracing the movement of lines and planes left on a surface stripped of color, viewers once more encounter the question of what allows a landscape to take form.

The final axis of the exhibition stems from a shift in medium. For an artist who has long explored form and perspective, sculpture becomes a natural extension. Following Wood Sculpture (2023), she presents Forms in Sequence (2025), ceramic works that embody new facets of landscapes. Here, the sculptural experiment extracts clues from the pictorial plane as images emerge three-dimensionally into physical space. Ceramics follow principles different from painting: clay shrinks in the kiln, cracks appear unbidden, forms twist unexpectedly. These are subtle physical laws beyond our full control — qualities of nature itself, elements of landscape. Jung embraces such contingencies, allowing fractures and distortions to bring vitality. The result is a landscape, lifted from the canvas and placed directly before us.

Through experiments with the expansion and restraint of color and the passage from surface to volume, Forms in Sequence (2025) recasts the question: how might one come to see a mountain? What appears on the surface may be lines and colors, or the faint trace of graphite, yet within them linger fragments of remembered scenes. A mountain might reside in a curve, in a monochrome interval, or in the briefest touch of a fingertip. Jung’s work avoids settling into certainty; instead, it waits for each viewer to complete the image with their own eyes. Like the form that reveals itself only after prolong looking, her landscapes slowly come into being through the act of seeing.