KOO Jiyoon: Silver: Solo Exhibition

KOO Jiyoon (b. 1982) has long explored the urban landscape of Seoul, translating its impressions and emotions into the language of abstract painting. She perceives the city’s ever-shifting rhythms of construction and collapse as akin to the life cycle of a biological organism—destined, like all living things, to fade and persist only in memory. For the artist, Seoul appears as both a grey-and-silver-toned landscape and a painterly subject layered with the sediment of time. Silver, with its brilliant ability to reflect surrounding light, evokes a distinctly different emotional resonance from that of matte gray. While gray may conjure the surfaces of high-rise buildings layered over what is old and fading in the city, shimmering silver calls to mind the silent vitality held within the ripples of the Han River. To the artist, the silver of the city is “a light that drifts between the old and the new, between what has been erased and what remains.”

 

Silver, the title of the exhibition, symbolizes both light and time—two core elements that underpin KOO Jiyoon’s continued exploration of the city and the medium of painting. Silver functions as both a surface and a reflector, returning light to the viewer. It is less a word that denotes silver itself, and more a symbol that evokes the fact that light and time are inherent in all colors. On the artist’s canvas, accumulated layers of color are fragments of light, each with its own wavelength. As these layers are reflected through different material qualities, they appear to the eye as vivid hues or muted tones. Light, transformed into color through its encounter with a subject, emerges as an aesthetic agent that resonates with emotion and memory. To perceive a color like silver—indeed, to perceive any color—requires time: time for the light absorbed by a surface to return to the world as reflection. Time, then, becomes a central axis in KOO’s work. With every brushstroke and each layer of pigment, she inscribes time into her canvases. Through gestures of layering, covering, and revealing, the surface becomes a “site where time has seeped in”—a visual field imbued with duration and presence.

 

KOO Jiyoon (b. 1982, Daegu, Korea) earned her BFA in Fine Art from Korea National University of Arts (2006) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007), and her MFA in Studio Art from New York University (2010). She has presented solo exhibitions at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (2025; 2021), Gallery Purple (2022), ARARIO MUSEUM in SPACE (2018), and Project Space Sarubia (2016), among others. Her work has also been shown in group exhibitions at Mimesis Art Museum (2024), New Spring Project (2024), ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (2024; 2021), ARARIO GALLERY CHEONAN (2021; 2020), Doosan Gallery Seoul (2019; 2014), Soda Museum (2019), Hite Collection (2018), Zaha Museum (2018; 2015), and Doosan Gallery New York (2010). Her works are held in the collections of ARARIO MUSEUM and the Bank of Korea.