Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present Kyung Jeon: Belle Rascal. For her second solo exhibition with the gallery, Jeon has chosen an approach that evokes her process – exhibiting a selection of small works, preparatory drawings, and pages from her sketchbook alongside two fully-realized large-scale paintings.

Drawing influences from such disparate sources as children’s fairytales, traditional Korean genre painting, and the eccentric worlds of Henry Darger and Hieronymus Bosch, Jeon’s works explore in-depth issues of portraiture and narrative. The mural-sized Little Persons, Big Steps and A Weeping Willow (both 2009) offer sweeping vistas of seemingly fantastical lands. Elaborately-rendered, these locales are inhabited by diminutive characters, deliberately simplified to function as archetypes of male or female, adult or child, who play out various scenarios in a full spectrum of emotion. Allegorical microcosms in-and-of themselves, these works are balanced by Jeon’s smaller paintings and drawings which focus more intently on individual characters and themes.

Kyung Jeon was born in 1975 in Jersey City, New Jersey, and received her MFA in 2005 from the School of Visual Arts, NY. The recipient of the Scope Emerging Art Grant (2005), and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship (2003), Jeon was most recently awarded a grant from the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2009). Her work has been included in exhibitions in museums and galleries in Asia, South America, Europe and the United States, including the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul and the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Jeon lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles, California.

A catalog is available in conjunction with this exhibition.