Seonhee Jung

8 HOLLAND STREET PRESENTS: SEONHEE JUNG

Seonhee Jung is a South Korean artist based in London, working across painting and installation. She studied Painting at Dongguk University, Seoul, and undertook an exchange at Goldsmiths, University of London, before completing her MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.

Her work is driven by the desire to hold onto what cannot be kept: passing time, unstable memories and the traces left by emotional experience. Moving between painted surfaces, suspended textiles, found objects and sound, Jung expands painting into spatial and sensory forms. Her solo exhibitions Take Shelter (2021) and A Room of One’s Own (2023) developed painting beyond the canvas and into the exhibition space, a direction continued in her Slade degree show Letter to Myself (2025).

Recent exhibitions include Moving Principle at Arusha Gallery, London; Hotel de Dream at Kingsgate Project Space, London; New Poems at Modern Animals, Zurich; and Line Shift and Bakery Shift at Small Time Project, London. In 2026, Jung was selected for the K-ART Young Artist Support Grant in Korea.

Momentary was made while reflecting on a brief chapter of her life. The painting brings together fragments of relationships, encounters, time and places into a panoramic image. It comes from the thought that even difficult experiences soften with time, while joyful moments can also pass or change into something else. For Seonhee, the work holds a desire to value the present moment more closely.

In every direction I look, there’s the sea came from a feeling of being lost or adrift. A wounded figure sits in a boat, while rain and blood seem to dissolve into the sea, surrounded by a yellow landscape that appears strangely beautiful. 

“I am often interested in this kind of contrast, where beauty or brightness can make a difficult emotion feel more vivid and real.”

Experiment of colour and surface is a more process-led painting. It depicts a figure lying in a hammock, and was made through repeated thin layers of oil paint, applied, dried and rubbed back over several days. The work came from an interest in colour, surface and the physical rhythm of painting.