[Gallery Stroll] "I Want to Paint Everyday Life Where Famous Faces Can Belong"

Interview with Artist Kwon Neung
Atelier Aki’s “The Seasonality of the Everyday”: How Does Painting Inspire Belief in Images?
“Art and History Are Embedded in Ordinary Life”
When Art History and Pop Culture Enter Everyday Moments

Van Gogh watches a film in his studio. In the alleys of Hong Kong, the presence of a Wong Kar-wai film lingers, and on one side of a Han River landscape, a bottle of Jangsu Makgeolli sits. In front of Kwon Neung’s paintings, the viewer first looks for people. Who is that figure, and why is that object there? But as you look longer, the questions change. It’s not why famous faces are here, but rather, why do the ordinary places we inhabit so readily accept them?

Kwon Neung, Where the Film Ended, the Painting Began, 2026, oil on canvas, 85 x 120 cm. Atelier Aki

Kwon Neung’s solo exhibition “The Seasonality of the Everyday: Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring” at Atelier Aki P1 in Seongdong-gu, Seoul, marks the artist’s first solo show at a domestic gallery, after having based much of his career in Shenzhen, China. Born in 1990, Kwon graduated from Hongik University’s Department of Painting and has worked in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Miami. This exhibition features over ten new paintings.

The title of the exhibition does not begin with spring. It is summer, autumn, winter, and spring. Kwon Neung said, “I thought that by simply changing the order, we might be able to see the current moment of everyday life from a new perspective.” In his paintings, the seasons are not a natural order, but an arrangement of sensations. Even the same place becomes a different scene depending on the weather, mood, or memories of a particular day.

He does not look down on the everyday. “If you look closely, I think that even in what appears ordinary, famous art, history, and stories are embedded everywhere. The issue, I believe, is how we discover them.” In places like the Han River, an alley near the Hong Kong Mid-Levels Escalator, a studio, or a dining table, you find classical paintings, contemporary films, pop culture characters, and liquor bottles placed together. It may seem like a guessing game, but knowledge is not the main point. The essence is the realization that things we once considered distant are already meeting in our daily lives.

Kwon Neung, The Night Borrowed from Eternity, 2026, oil on canvas, 94 x 150 cm. Atelier Aki

The starting point was when he encountered Takashi Murakami in person at the Hong Kong Art Fair during his college years. When an artist he’d only seen in textbooks and images walked into his own living space, he felt as if “the walls were coming down.” Back at school, watching friends paint, he thought: artists in art history must have struggled, failed, and painted again in their own daily lives, just like this. In Kwon Neung’s paintings, the masters are not summoned, but invited. They step down from their lofty pedestals to drink, watch movies, and walk the streets.

Kwon Neung says that when selecting figures, he tries not to undermine their sense of “personhood.” The more famous the figure, the more stories and personalities the audience already associates with them, making it easy to place them in a particular situation. Conversely, with figures like Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” whose stories are less known, there is more room for imagination. He does not provide definitive answers about the figures. Instead, he creates a situation in which they are placed. The story that follows is completed by the viewer.

In an era overflowing with images, the medium Kwon Neung holds onto is painting. The reason is not simply its age. It is because of a peculiar belief that has survived precisely because it is old. He said, “When Jesus appears in a photograph, you might think it’s someone dressed as Jesus or an AI-generated image. But when Jesus appears in a painting, we naturally accept him as Jesus in the painting.” Painting makes no attempt to hide its fiction, yet it leads us to believe in it. For Kwon Neung, this is the power of painting.

The work "We Still Believe in Images" by Kwon Neung is a piece that brings together the Olympic flame, classical paintings, pop culture characters, and contemporary figures in a space reminiscent of the Shanghai Art Fair venue. The artist questions how images create belief and memory through the sensation that "Jesus in the painting is accepted as Jesus." Atelier Aki

The title “We Still Believe in Images” also comes from this idea. To believe in images is not the same as believing in their factuality. “It’s not that we believe in certain images because they are factual, but because, based on our own experiences, some images evoke faith.” For some, it might be a family photo; for others, a social media picture; for yet others, an old sacred image or a scene from a film. In Kwon Neung’s paintings, images are not evidence. They are triggers that press memory, emotion, and knowledge all at once.

The city of Shenzhen also broadened his canvas. After graduating, he chose to go to China instead of staying in Korea. “Because my work is shaped by the spaces I inhabit and the experiences I have, I thought that new spaces and experiences would make my work richer.” Traveling between Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing, he saw cities already blended together. French architecture and Chinese daily life, the accents and food of outsiders, and traces of the past overlapped on the city’s surface. The East and West, reality and imagination, which he sought to merge in his paintings, were already present within the city.

Gwonneung, Author. Atelier Aki

The market responded quickly. He gained attention at overseas art fairs, and sales followed. The artist did not hide his sense of pressure. “I hear that visitors and collectors like my work, and from the perspective of a commercial gallery, they want pieces that sell well.” However, he recalls the words of a teacher he has long admired: that works from the past, present, and future will likely never stray far from the category of “Kwon Neung” as an artist. He said, “I believe I am continuing my work at my own pace, in my own way.”

Upon leaving the exhibition, the famous faces in the paintings gradually fade. Instead, what linger are the Makgeolli bottle, the glow of a street lamp in an alley, the night in the studio, oysters on a dining table, and the movement of an escalator. Kwon Neung does not say that art comes down into everyday life. He says that everyday life was already a space broad enough to coexist with art, film, myth, and liquor bottles. The exhibition runs until August 8.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.