KOO Jiyoon

Installation View (1)

ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL is pleased to present Silver, a solo exhibition by KOO Jiyoon (b. 1982, Korea), on view from April 23 (Wed) to June 7 (Sat), 2025. KOO has consistently translated impressions and emotions drawn from the everyday urban landscape of cities—including Seoul—into the language of abstract painting. In her work, the ever-rising and collapsing buildings, roads, and densely packed artificial structures are envisioned as biological organisms—living entities that undergo cycles of birth and decay. Through this lens, she expresses a sense of empathy for the city, destined to remain only in memory, like all organic beings that inevitably fade away. This exhibition features 21 recent and new paintings by the artist. Centered around the thematic key of Silver, the show explores the temporality of the city through a rich spectrum of painterly expression.

 KOO Jiyoon, Read Along the Crack, 2024, Oil on canvas, 227.3 x 181.8 cm

KOO Jiyoon sees Seoul as a landscape rendered in shades of grey and silver—a painterly subject layered with strata of time. Silver, while technically achromatic—differing only in brightness among the three attributes of color: hue, saturation, and brightness—possesses a brilliant ability to reflect surrounding light, evoking a distinctly different emotional resonance from that of matte grey. Whereas grey conjures the weathered surfaces of high-rise buildings that enshroud what has long vanished from the city, shimmering silver recalls the unspoken vitality of ripples on the Han River in Seoul. For 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.”

KOO Jiyoon, Spiderweb, 2024, Oil on linen, 40.9 x 31.8 cm

Accordingly, the exhibition title Silver simultaneously symbolizes “light” and “time”— two core elements that underpin KOO Jiyoon’s continued exploration of the city and the medium of painting. 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.

KOO Jiyoon, Vintage, 2025, Oil on canvas, 290.9 x 218.2 cm

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 Jiyoon’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. The exhibition title Silver, along with the titles of works such as Vintage (2025), Patina (2025), Faded Silver (2025), and Fossil (2025), evokes a sense of aging and temporal accumulation. In the rapid cycle of construction and disappearance that defines today’s urban ecology, certain things and beings persist—aging in place. Objects, sites, and people that carry layers of memory and history reflect time back into the world, sometimes becoming more luminous because of it. Words that suggest age and decay, on KOO Jiyoon’s canvas, refer not to disappearance but to accumulation. The paintings in this exhibition explore how various subjects, translated into the language of painting, reflect and project time—and how they are perceived through this process. For the artist, painting is a record of sensation, a means of preserving time. It is, in her words, “an act born from the desire to see again what has vanished—just as fossils return from the past into the present or future, I wish to materialize the present and send it forward to tomorrow, or further, so that it may be seen again.”

Installation View (2)

ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL
85 Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea 03058

+82 2 541 5701

WEBSITE  INSTAGRAM  FACEBOOK  YOUTUBE  ARTSY