Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present Kyung Jeon: a story. For her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Jeon has created an ambitious cycle of 13 large-scale works that trace the story of a boy and a girl as they descend together into a symbolic world of dark forces and mythic transformation.

Painted on the traditional support of Korean rice paper and then mounted on canvas, each individual work represents a chapter in the character’s journey. Similar to a hand scroll or a children’s picture book, the works can be understood fluidly, both individually and as an opus. Playing with their dual character and in concert with the gallery exhibition, Jeon has designed a full color catalog that includes an accompanying text. This book can be seen as both a guide to interpreting the canvases and an independent work.

Drawing their 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 narrative is at once allegorical and fantastical. At the outset of the tale, “an old story” as the text proclaims it, the two protagonists leave their Edenic paradise. The ensuing journey finds the boy and the girl confronting a crossroads, negotiating a labyrinth, meeting unlikely allies and facing menacing enemies. Jeon purposefully leaves the ending vague – and the story remains a poetic meditation on timeless themes of love and loss.

Kyung Jeon was born in 1975 in Jersey City, New Jersey, and received an MFA in 2005 from the School of Visual Arts, NY. The recipient of the Scope Emerging Art Grant (2005) as well as the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship (2003), her work has been included in exhibitions in Asia, South America, Europe and the United States. She was selected to participate in the biannual ARTSPECTRUM 2006 exhibition, which showcases emerging talent, at the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, Korea. In 2009, she will have solo exhibitions in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia with the Savannah College of Art and Design. Jeon lives and works in New York City.