Jeong says that “Hallmark Project” is “a story about dreams, reality, images that are injected, and what exists.” In the project, she has collected, borrowed, and rearranged thousands of images and characters from the famous greeting card company Hallmark; then she completed the paintings by applying traditional painting techniques―chiaroscuro, gradation, contrast, and optical illusion. For “Hallmark Project―Encourage” (2011), Jeong collected characters such as Smile, Superman, and princesses from Disney animation, and rearranged them to incite viewers to imagine the gaps between stereotypes and reality. “‘Hallmark’ by Jeong does not merely consists of images from Hallmark Cards; more broadly, it reflects the reality of the current culture, which has been created and materialized by images in general, and illustrates true consciousness and senses of each individual. At the same time, the work overturns them: fictional or potential objects (from signs, flights of fancy, dream, memory, reminiscence between you and I to the truth of the history to the vision for the future), which is created by what is existent (from masterpieces in the East and West to printed products by the card company), is materialized on the thin, flat surface.” (Kang Sumi, art critic)
Soyoun Jeong (b. 1967) received her bachelor’s degree in 1992 and master’s degree in 1996 from the Department of Painting at Ewha Womans University. She also received her master’s degree in communication art from New York Institute of Technology in 2006 and doctoral degree in image engineering in art technology from the Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science, Multimedia & Film at Chung-Ang University in 2011. Her solo exhibitions include “Funnier Exhibition, Really, Really!” at SSamzie Space in 2005; “The Hallmark Project” at LEEHWAIK Gallery in 2011; and “Neverland” at LEEHWAIK Gallery in 2014. She has participated in various group exhibitions at home and abroad including “Happiness” at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2003; “Alchemy in Daily Life” at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, currently MMCA in Korea in 2004; and “Art Spectrum” at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in 2006. She was selected for artist-in-residence programs including Art Omi International Artists Residency; International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York; SSamzie Space; and Gyeonggi Creation Center.
By observing changes going on society and the art world, Soyoun Jeong has presented works exploring themes of social structure, culture, and everyday life through various mediums from painting to objects, installation, and new media. In her early work, Jeong developed the theme of institutionalized oppression on women through objects such as a Barbie doll in a wedding dress and a bathtub made of wool. She also discussed women and gender as an object of “the gaze” by projecting a video that captures the eye in a vertical line, associating it with female genitals. Meanwhile Jeong borrowed various toys and cartoons, objects used in child care, to express the gap between what is real and what is imagined in today’s popular culture, thereby overlapping the identity as woman with the contemporary’s perception of reality. Since 2000, she has experimented with the possibilities of art for communication: to embody two intrinsic but contradictory characteristics of video―simultaneity and recordability―by juxtaposing footage that captures specific places or objects in time lapse; and to install interactive media work that projects texts corresponding to the voices of the audience in the exhibition space. More recently, through the hyper-realistic painting, “Hallmark Project” and “Neverland,” she has sought to upend the relationship between what is real and what is imitated, and has opened a critical cultural discourse on the image of products in a capitalist society.
