Artist Bio
Yujin Jung (b. 2000, Seoul) is a London-based painter.
She is currently studying MA Painting at the Royal College of Art and graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London in 2024.
Her work explores how perception is reshaped in the digital age,
focusing on the tension between distance and intimacy, visibility and touch.
Drawing from satellite imagery, digital mapping, and magnified photographic views, Jung constructs painterly surfaces where radically different scales and viewpoints coexist.
Through layered paint, translucent surfaces, and unstable spatial cues, her paintings invite tactile desire while resisting physical access. Rather than offering clear images or fixed meanings, her work dwells in states of ambiguity and suspension, proposing painting as a site for slowed, attentive looking within an image-saturated world.
I think we are being a cake
Oil on canvas
35x27cm
2024
< I think we are being a cake > was developed in response to Byung-Chul Han’s concept of the “digital panopticon” as articulated in The Transparency Society.
Han describes a contemporary condition in which surveillance no longer operates through external force, but through voluntary exposure, visibility, and self-display.
In this work, circular compositional structures frame figures that appear to perform, rotate, and dissolve within painterly layers. The imagery evokes both celebration and unease: the cake as a symbol of pleasure, consumption, and visibility becomes a metaphor for bodies subjected to continuous observation.
Through softened contours and unstable forms, the painting resists fixed legibility, reflecting the tension between participation and control embedded within digital transparency.
Rather than illustrating surveillance directly, the work operates through material ambiguity—
allowing paint, texture, and spatial uncertainty to convey how contemporary subjects internalise visibility, becoming both observer and observed.
"Painting is a tool to visualise the invisible structures shaping our ways of seeing today,
questioning the balance between liberation and limitation in the age of digital observation. "
Cell Studio Hackney Wick 2025
My practice investigates the contradictions of seeing in the digital age, where images feel increasingly close yet remain physically and sensorially inaccessible. I am particularly interested in how contemporary visual technologies—such as satellite imagery and digital mapping—collapse distance while disrupting embodied perception. Working through painting, I focus on ambiguity as an active condition rather than a lack of resolution. By bringing together radically different viewpoints—such as aerial perspectives and magnified fragments of natural forms—I construct pictorial spaces in which scale, depth, and orientation become unstable. These images resist immediate legibility, inviting a slower and more attentive mode of looking.