website: https://jione.studio

 

I draw the duality of human relationships, the mind, and emotions. The keywords underpinning my works are ‘absence and presence,’ ‘distance,’ and ‘love and hate.’ The way I remember someone always accompanies a sense of hatred. And I draw people whom I can no longer see. Ironically, my uncomfortable memories of loved ones make me recall them more vividly and evoke emotional complexities in my mind.

Whenever I draw a portrait, I find it most compelling to sketch that person without their presence. This condition relates to how I pine for that person in my mind; in other words, drawing someone while having an intense desire to see them is the best way for me to shape their portrait. Those feelings stem from my personal experience. Last year, I left my own country and started began living totally alone. This experience made me long for specific people more than ever.

Furthermore, living abroad reminds me continually of the distance between me and others. That separation has two facets: one is the actual distance between Korea and the UK; the other is psychological distance. These days, I express psychological distance, allowing the blotches in dark areas to depict my ever-changing mental state. It is impossible to find eternal satisfaction in our relationships with loved ones; in life, encounters are followed by partings, and periods of happiness are exceeded by those of sadness. All relationships are made of such moments. I find similarities between the accumulation of these moments in relationships and the super-imposed pencil lines; the feelings and memories that accumulate over time can claw, delicately mount, disappear, darken, and leave traces.