Collection: Dayeon HWANG

Following her participation in numerous group exhibitions during the early stages of her training, Hwang Dayeon initiated a significant increase in her solo exhibitions after graduating from the prestigious Hongik University's College of Fine Arts in Seoul. These exhibitions expanded beyond Korea, reaching venues in London and the United States.

There is something immediately appealing and soothing about contemplating the works of Hwang Dayeon, whose use of color borrows from the work of Faber Birren to achieve this sense of fulfillment. These are familiar landscapes, vacation spots, and summer pastimes - it would be a call to idleness if not for the absence of human beings. Instead, an assortment of miscellaneous objects evoke their passage in a past as old as a few moments or several centuries.

Rather than Freud's uncanny strangeness, it is a quiet strangeness that allows the viewer to project their own memories: the smell of the sea, the rubber of inflatable balls, the chlorine of swimming pools, and the scent of sunscreen on deck chairs. Above all, the artist's box of figurines, which she randomly places on her canvases, contains antique sculptures. These sculptures are ironically distant from our modern travel habits, which alternate between relaxing, superficial activities and obligatory archaeological or cultural visits. Our memories mix these items to create a unique panorama, our little lost summer paradise.

The artist speaks of "pantopia," an ideal world that anyone can recreate at any time through the projection of an imaginary world. It is a poetic echo of the apocryphal quote from André Bazin that opens Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris: "Cinema," said Bazin, "substitutes for our gaze a world that matches our desires. Le Mépris is the story of that world." Whether it be the colors of the fading Cinecittà film studio paradise, where much of the film takes place; the clean lines of Villa Malaperte in Capri, which opens onto a turquoise ocean; or the ancient busts conversing to tell the story of Ulysses, Hwang Dayeon's work is also the story of this world.