Bio
Yujin Jung is a London-based Korean painter whose work
explores the relationship between images, distance, and perception.
Her paintings often begin from visual fragments found through everyday and digital encounters, including satellite views, reflected surfaces, aerial perspectives, and distorted images.
Working primarily in oil, Jung builds layered surfaces that move between abstraction and recognition. Blurred fields, tactile textures, circular formations, and repeated marks recur throughout her work, creating spaces where scale and distance become unstable. A painted surface may suggest water, skin, a screen, or a landscape seen from above, while small forms may appear as figures, traces, or signs depending on the viewer’s position.
Jung’s practice is shaped by an interest in how images are constructed and how they influence the way reality is perceived.
Growing up, she encountered advertising sets through her father’s work, observing how scenes were arranged, lit, framed, and transformed for the camera. This early experience informed her ongoing attention to the gap between lived reality, constructed reality, and the final image.
Rather than offering a fixed or immediately legible image, Jung’s paintings invite viewers to look slowly, move closer, step back, and notice what was not visible at first. Her work considers how seeing is shaped by distance, surface, memory, and the things that remain hidden or unresolved.
Born in 2000 in Seoul, Jung pursued painting from an early age and studied at Sunhwa Arts Middle and High School, one of Korea’s leading arts schools. Her formative years were marked by scholarship recognition, multiple awards, and the encouragement of teachers who recognised her potential as an artist.
After moving to London in 2019, Jung studied BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, where her understanding of painting expanded beyond image-making towards a philosophical mode of thinking. She graduated in 2024 and is currently completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. After completing her MA, Jung will continue her practice at Kindred Studios in London.
CV
Education
2025–2026 MA Painting, Royal College of Art
2019–2024 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, UK
2013–2019 Sunhwa Arts Middle - High School Fine Art, Seoul, South Korea (Scholarship)
Yujin Jung in the Opening Night in Noho Showroom Gallery 2025, in front of her work Beyond the Gaze
Visitor viewing Yujin ’s work during the opening night at Purist Gallery, London, 2025.
Selected Group Exhibitions
2026
Coningsby Gallery, 'Juliette's London', London, UK
Trio Show, SQFT: Space Gallery, ‘Develop The Occurrence’, London, UK
AMP Gallery, ‘Untold’, London, UK
2025
Hockney Gallery, ‘Remind Me of My Senses’, London, UK
Noho Showrooms, ‘Dear Madeleine’, London, UK
Purist Gallery, ‘The City Listens Back’, London, UK
Duo Show and Artist Talk, WWW space, ‘Half On’, Seoul, KR
Warbling Collective, ‘Seems both distant and so close’, London, UK
Feelium Gallery, ‘Holographic Dream’, London, UK
2024
Chelsea College of Arts, ‘Degree Show’, London, UK
2023
Space Gallery Courtyard, 'Stitch', London, UK
Black White Gallery, 'Accessible Art Show', London, UK
2022
Garden Walk, 'Comma', London, UK
2018
'SAS', Solger Gallery, Seoul, South Korea
2016
Gangdong Art Centre, Seoul, South Korea (Awarded)
Award
2026 Jackson’s Art Prize, Longlisted
Artist Talk
2026 Royal College of Art
2025 Selected Duo Show, WWW space, ‘Half On’, Seoul, KR
2025 Group Show, Feelium Gallery, ‘Holographic Dream’, London, UK
Collections
Works acquired internationally
Teaching / Professional experience
2025 Art Instructor, Private Art Academies (Entrance Exam Preparation), Seoul, Korea
2025 Workshop Instructor (Korean Minhwa Painting), Amazon, London, United Kingdom
2024 Painting Assistant, London
Artist Statement
My painting practice explores how contemporary visual culture shapes perception and form of communication.
I am interested in how images construct, distort, and mediate what we think we see.
I often think about a contradiction within today’s image culture.
Through screens, satellite views, and digital platforms, the world appears more accessible than ever.
At the same time, we are increasingly exposed to others and to larger systems of observation.
I see this as a panopticon-like condition, where looking, being watched, tracking, and exposure become part of everyday experience.
This makes me question whether visibility gives us freedom, or whether it can also become a form of control.
I reflect this duality through my painting process.
Controlled and accidental brushwork coexist on the same surface, just as abstraction and figuration coexist within the image. For instance, in Blue Aperture, I use a texture found through Google Maps satellite imagery as the ground for subtle circular groups of seated figures. The satellite-like surface suggests a distant, almost non-human viewpoint, while the figures evoke gathering, intimacy, and community.
Yet because they are seen from above, they also carry a sense of exposure and surveillance.
Rather than offering a fixed narrative, I create paintings as spaces for active looking.
I want the viewer’s gaze to move between distance and proximity, recognition and uncertainty, attraction and discomfort. Through this instability, I ask what it means to see — and to be seen — within contemporary visual culture.
Yujin Jung in the RCA Painting Studio, 2026
Drawing in the studio, 2026