The earth is both the origin and the final destination of human life, a vast field in which the ceaseless transformations of the cosmos unfold. Beyond the reach of human intention, it opens out without fixed purpose, endlessly repeating cycles of emergence and return. These recurring movements of the earth generate the complexity and diversity of all things, including human life, leading us toward worlds that cannot be fully anticipated or predicted. Within the embrace of this immense field, we live by leaning on the earth’s breath: learning from one another, breathing together, and sharing what sustains us. Yet the profound course by which the earth moves cannot be named through reason or the five senses alone. It can only be approached through deep reflection on life and through acts of lived practice.
Jeong Wookyung leans into the breath of the earth and responds to its call, repeatedly unfolding and folding her artistic thought. At times she seems to dance with the wind that sweeps across a vast terrain, wielding a broad brush; at others, immersed in deep concentration, she uses a fine brush to attune her breathing to that of the earth, filling and emptying the surface strand by strand. The act of inscribing and erasing the grain of the earth reveals how beings-in-the-world are entangled with one another, while metaphorically articulating both the world’s absence of predetermined purpose and the intimate relation between Jeong’s inner and outer worlds. In the subtle forms that accumulate across her knitting-like painted surfaces, one senses the bodily warmth of someone praying for another.
The surface of the work bears the traces of all the external time the artist has lived in the world, while beneath it remain the unfiltered traces of the internal time she has accumulated through experience. A gesture of care passes into form; form becomes body, earth, and the breath of the earth. It then enters the viewer’s emotional register, where these elements converge and generate a deep resonance.
Within Jeong’s Past, Present and… series are several monumental works measuring more than 130 centimeters in height and over nine meters in width. Each takes roughly a year of concentrated labor to bring into being. Their making recalls the fierce discipline of spiritual practice, the endurance of a pilgrim, a mother’s prayer before a bowl of pure water, or the devotion of a parent making clothing by hand for a child. Jeong completes such monumental works only once every two or three years. The duration of their production suggests a sustained period of introspection, akin to a practitioner seated before a wall in silent meditation.
Her working process may be described as follows. Jeong first covers one long wall of her studio with white canvas, upon which she seeks to evoke the energy and rhythms of myriad forms of life latent within the earth. Beginning at the far left, she draws a slender vertical line and then lays brushstrokes to either side of it. Small, leaf-like marks gather on the surface; one line is laid over another, then another again. Thousands of strokes accumulate around a single vertical axis before that section is complete, after which the process begins anew. Vertical lines repeat seemingly without end, crossed by innumerable points and marks. Like loops of knitting interlocking stitch by stitch, or warp and weft multiplying through the repeated crossings of a loom, the work grows over days, weeks, months, half a year, and finally a year, until the artist places the last mark upon this expansive field of earth.
Once completed, the work is rotated 180 degrees for exhibition. Left and right, sky and ground, exchange their positions, and the lines that were initially drawn downward now rise toward the sky. Perhaps because of this reversal, the dots, lines, and planes that had been visible at close range—and the material impression of a canvas seemingly knitted line by line—suddenly recede. What remains before the eye is the undulation of a verdant earth. Grasses appear to bend and cry out in unison, carried by the current of the wind and the breath of the land. By subdividing the canvas and filling each interval through repeated brushwork, Jeong transforms the visible space of the canvas—the conventional space we call an artwork—into an invisible, experiential space. A bold, imaginative, and playful field thereby unfolds.
In conversation, Jeong has spoken of the profound impact of Nietzsche’s thought and of how her own artistic thinking resonates with what she understands as the “call of the earth.” She has also emphasized that “the source of all energy in the world is a positive and infinite love, like a mother’s womb.” In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s insistence on remaining faithful to the earth opens onto questions of human identity, meaningful life, and morality. His thought asks the individual to discover and affirm one’s own value and potential, rather than living according to inherited judgments or the prejudices of others. It proposes the possibility of creating values beyond existing moral systems and stresses the importance of becoming a free spirit who assumes responsibility for one’s own life. This creative force becomes a source through which one can become the author of one’s life and grow into a self-determining individual. Nietzsche’s thought, in turn, leads toward Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, which seeks to move beyond rigid divisions between subject and object and to explore the creativity, concepts, possibilities, and potentials that arise through relations with others. It is a mode of thought that respects the existence and thinking of the other while opening toward the production of the new. In this context, the central proposition of Jeong’s practice may be understood as “positive and infinite love”: the love and understanding embedded in her relationship with her mother reappear through the structures and patterns of knitting. The “call of the earth,” in this sense, becomes inseparable from the maternal earth—the earth that gives birth to, nourishes, and embraces all life.
Considering Jeong’s personal experiences alongside the artistic thinking that guides her work deepens our encounter with each piece in the Past, Present and… series. At the core of her work is an attitude of contemplation and understanding toward the world of things. Personal memories, the emotions and affections that arise from them, and their expansion into new experience and understanding all enter the picture: the small brushstroke from which the surface begins, the gestures of life sprouting from the earth, and the rhythms of living things that root themselves deeply in the ground and grow slowly toward the sky. Just as yarn expands through the interlacing structure of knitting, Jeong’s varied lines of thought twist, rub against one another, and become entwined before being absorbed into a broader horizon of reflection. The textures generated through this repetition take on multiple structures, as complex and varied as the inner worlds of human beings.
These concerns converge in the Past, Present and… series. Across Jeong’s many works, a broad field of artistic thought has been woven strand by strand: a daughter and mother greeting one another with palms together; a smiling mother and son; a pregnant figure carrying new life; family portraits blossoming into flowers; and portraits of Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi, figures associated with compassion, devotion, love, and forgiveness. The impulses expressed across these images are gradually interwoven into a wide and deep terrain of thought.
Ultimately, Jeong’s formal language moves beyond conventional representation toward the construction of a metaphorical and contemplative pictorial surface through the image and structure of knitting. As though reading the grain of a person’s mind, she follows the textures of feeling and peels back accumulated layers of time. Although this process gives the canvas the object-like appearance of a textile woven from yarn, the work simultaneously empties the surface of overtly artificial expression, leaving the act itself exposed. Her pictorial language operates as a knitted structure while also allowing the inner and outer dimensions of recognizable forms and objects to emerge. Moving beyond an image-centered conception of painting, the work becomes an intimate projection of the artist’s body onto the surface: close contrasts of color and subtle shifts of brushwork across measured intervals converge into an intense pictorial movement. In this non-figurative register, strokes, flows, and folds occupy the threshold between inside and outside, alternately expanding and compressing space and moving across the boundaries of painting. The work is thus generated in the shifting interval between representation and non-representation, between emptiness and presence.
Jeong’s work also conveys an invisible warmth directed toward the world around us. Human beings, caught in anger, grief, and the discriminations accumulated through the past, too easily forget the capacious virtues of consideration, tolerance, generosity, compassion, forgiveness, and understanding. Through her work, the artist seems to say: “Remember: you are here because of someone’s love and devotion.” Following the call and breath of the earth, Jeong reveals a world infinitely entangled in complexity and diversity through a sustained practice of making. Her body becomes the knitting needle and her thought the yarn; with her whole being, she weaves one strand at a time. It is through this embodied act that her work achieves its profound resonance.
