As it continues to expand its programming beyond its existing locations, HdM Gallery is
pleased to present land on me softly, a solo exhibition by Yeonsu Ju.
Presenting ten new works from her Lisbon studio, the exhibition explores memory,
longing, and the unstable relationship between presence and absence. The series
culminates a year of development for Yeonsu Ju, following a successful residency at
‘The Cabin’ in Los Angeles.
Born in the southern countryside of Korea, Ju creates paintings that function
as sites of invocation—spaces where sensation, memory, and emotion emerge
and dissolve in continuous cycles. Her figures resist fixed identities and
conventional portraiture, appearing instead as fleeting presences suspended between
recognition and disappearance.
Working primarily in oil on raw linen, Ju primes only the reverse side of the canvas,
allowing the exposed weave and absorbent surface to remain visible. Pigment settles
unevenly into the fabric, creating images that feel both immediate and elusive. Without
preliminary drawings or predetermined compositions, her paintings develop intuitively
through the act of painting itself. Faces, gestures, and chromatic relationships emerge
gradually, as though summoned rather than constructed.
Quiet references to Korean ancestral rituals run throughout the work. Circles traced in
air, repeated gestures, and offerings made before absence evoke ceremonial practices
that seek connection between the living and the dead. In certain memorial traditions,
the dead are not remembered as distant figures but as undead presences—
temporarily invited back among the living, occupying a space that is neither fully
absent nor fully present. Ju's paintings inhabit this threshold, where visibility and
invisibility, memory and forgetting, continuously overlap.
Central to the exhibition is an exploration of memory not as a fixed archive but as a
living process. Drawing upon ideas of duration and becoming, the works suggest that
memory is constantly reshaped through perception, emotion, and time. Recent
paintings introduce diagrammatic elements—circles, directional markings, and
fragmented spatial structures—that function as emotional cartographies rather than
explanatory systems. These recurring forms trace the movement of thought, grief,
intimacy, and desire as they loop, dissolve, and return.
The body remains an important yet unstable presence throughout the exhibition. Faces
fragment, expressions shift, and multiple emotional states coexist within a single
image. Rather than depicting singular subjects, Ju's paintings reveal how images
persist within us, accumulating emotional residue long after their original moment has
passed.
Colour moves instinctively across the surface in saturated reds, bruised blues,
luminous yellows, and dense shadows. The paintings possess a simultaneous
intimacy and intensity, drawing viewers into atmospheres charged with
vulnerability, remembrance, and unresolved longing.
In land on me softly, painting becomes a vessel for what resists permanence.
Through gestures of appearance and disappearance, Ju creates spaces where memory
returns in fragments, where the invisible briefly takes form, and where images continue
to circulate long after they have vanished.
TEXT BY ANA BUJOŠEVIĆ
