Heemin Chung: THE NEUTRAL featured in a Group Exhibition at The Willow

Heemin Chung presents a large-scale painting at a group exhibition, THE NEUTRAL, curated by Sungah Serena Choo at The WilloW in Seoul, South Korea. 

The Neutral draws its title from Roland Barthes’s lecture course Le Neutre, a term that expands beyond its grammatical origin—le neutre—into a space where emotions coexist fleetingly without settling into fixed form. Here, the neutral is not a midpoint of feeling, nor an expression of detachment, but the moment just before emotion is exhausted, the light on the verge of disappearance, a suspended interval in which one endures loss. Like a sentence that can never fully contain sorrow, the neutral signals a state where every emotion flickers at once, yet none culminate definitively.

This exhibition traces that subtle terrain of simultaneity and hesitation. Within today’s oversaturated image environment, it asks whether a language of empathy might still open a space that is both sensorial and ethical. Following faint spectral reverberations—those residues of what persists even as it fades—the exhibition unfolds as a quiet journey of mourning with what remains.

Through their distinct vocabularies, the participating artists offer passages into this fragile zone of perception, inviting viewers to dwell in the delicate tension between presence and disappearance, feeling and its dissolution.

Works :

Heemin Chung, Adrift, 2025, Oil, acrylic, modeling paste, pumice, gel medium and UV print on canvas, 250 x 333 cm.

Heemin Chung, On Your Young and Stirred Night, 2025, Copper tube and bronze, Dimensions variable.