HYE-SHIN CHUN

Close Conversations

Opening: February 17th, 6-8 PM

February 17th - March 13th, 2026

“Close Conversations” marks Los Angeles-based painter Hye-Shin Chun’s New York solo debut. In late 2025, Chun was featured in the Marian Goodman group show “Surfaces Streets.” The Korean artist graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received her B.F.A. in 2014.

The title of her new exhibition in the half gallery annex, speaks figuratively to the intimacy of exchanges even with ourselves, evident in a painting like “Mirror, Mirror.” She seeks out the dreamy, but familiar in her subject matter often opting for forced perspectives, which themselves can create a kind of secret world in the severity of their angles, a voyeuristic approach. “When I paint, I move around the canvas - back and forth, from one area to another - until my body finds a rhythm,” explains Chun. “That rhythm transfers on to the surface. I continue until the painting feels continuous, as if the eye can move without stopping at any point. It’s within this movement the angles begin to tilt, and meet together on canvas. Wobbly lines and forms, when they meet on canvas, make sounds to me, sounds of emotions.”

This symphonic approach to mark-making serves as a counter melody to the softness of her palette, often bordering on pastels to suggest the tension between loneliness and connection, emptiness and the intimate, reality and the other-worldly. “Figures can blend and fade away into the space they are in,” she elaborates.  “When the figures are dominant in the painting, I play with the background more. Nothing is really certain. You are not sure where they are. But you feel the emotions of the paint.”