Painting as an Uncharted Realm An Interview with Heemin Chung

By Song Jeong, edited by Sujin Kim

Heemin Chung builds her paintings by translating sensations derived from digital images into material strata and the temporalities of surfaces. For her, materials are more than tools—they operate as a core language that anchors perception and lends density to an image. As a result, each painting expands into a vast space that exceeds the frame. In this interview, Chung reflects on how she first brought digitally inspired sensations into a tangible, material form on the canvas, what led her to pursue this approach, and how her experiments with materials have since evolved. She recalls recognizing a moment when materials seemed to “speak,” functioning not just physically but as structures that support perception itself. This sensibility resonates throughout her recent solo exhibition Garden of Turmoil at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul, on view from late November until 7 February 2026.

Chung explains that the conceptual foundation of the exhibition was shaped by the lingering impression of J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840). Although the painting appears at first to depict a lyrical scene saturated with radiant light and color, it in fact addresses the tragedy of the Zong massacre—the historical incident in which enslaved people were thrown overboard for insurance claims. Rather than presenting this violence directly, Turner allows the collision between the painting’s atmospheric beauty and its brutal subject to exist in the unresolved tension between them. Chung describes this gap as particularly striking, and this emotional tension becomes a thread running through Garden of Turmoil.

She notes that, during the process of painting, the space on the canvas often shifts in meaning. At times, it feels like an open world that expands endlessly; at others, that very sense of boundlessness turns into something unsettling, even severe, creating a state of confusion that approaches a kind of limbo. The word “turmoil,” she explains, was the most fitting way to describe the spectrum of emotions she repeatedly encounters within her paintings.