Jeon Jechang

Jeon Jechang’s Painting: The Silent Formation of Being Jeon Jechang’s artistic process does not begin with an act of painting - it begins with waiting. Rather than imposing images, he allows them to emerge. Using traditional East Asian ink, not on mulberry paper but on linen canvas, he bridges the visual language of Eastern painting with the material foundation of Western painting. In doing so, he creates a surface where the tactile and the temporal converge, drawing attention to both presence and process. His paintings are shaped not by brushstrokes, but by the flow of water, the spread of ink, and the stains left behind as they dry. Yet, his work doesn’t dissolve entirely into abstraction. Through sedimentation, time, and material absorption, a sense of primordial landscape often surfaces - a quiet suggestion of mountain, sea, or river. These are not rendered representations, but traces left by the interaction between material and time, where intention yields to chance, and form arises through becoming. Viewers may find echoes of familiar scenes in his work, but never anything fixed. There is no precise memory or location. Instead, the impression is closer to what one might call a “memory of sensation” or a “sensation of memory”—intuitively evoked through the tactile language of material rather than form. His images seem to float like fragments of a dream, in which the vastness of nature is not observed, but felt - almost touched. Jeon does not seek to depict or symbolise landscape. Rather, he follows the nature of the materials, allowing the water and ink to move freely, intervening only minimally. His practice is one of observation and receptivity - waiting for a form to appear, for an image to emerge of its own accord. It is a quiet discipline, a belief not in artistic will, but in the slow revelation of image through process. In this way, Jeon’s painting becomes less an image, and more a material embodiment of time and perception. His work is both image and substance - ink layered on canvas, moisture creating paths of resistance, and texture forming the edges of experience. The physical properties of his materials become thresholds where the visual and the tangible meet. Here, we are not asked to interpret what we see, but to sense what exists beneath the surface. Painting, for Jeon, is not simply a mode of expression - it is a mode of being. His works do not illustrate the world, but rather, become it. They are self-generating landscapes, born not from imagination but from matter, process, and patience. As a result, his works confront the viewer not with clarity or narrative, but with stillness - offering not explanations, but atmospheres. The consistent use of monochrome and dark tonalities in his paintings is not merely an aesthetic choice. Though he does not explain it explicitly, one senses that the grain of life itself is embedded in the surface. Perhaps in his youth, his palette was brighter, more sunlit - reminiscent of a Mediterranean dream. But now, he searches for the light within silence and solitude, in the depths of black ink and muted greys. The truth of life, for him, is not in dazzling vistas, but in something closer to what Nietzsche once called “the still water of a deep well.” This is not a darkness of despair, but the sediment of a life lived deeply and slowly. His paintings do not seek attention - they endure. They carry a kind of warmth only found in those who have endured. There is quiet resilience in his tones, and within that restraint, a thread of subdued hope. To paint, for Jeon, is to reflect the purity of each moment. His forms are not performances, but honest traces of time - a silent record of presence. His surfaces reject explanation. Instead, they invite tactile understanding - through layers of material, traces of time, and the resonance of stillness. For Jeon, painting is not object, nor landscape, but a living body of silence. And as we stand before it, we remember: life does not always need to speak in order to be deeply understood.