Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. While you bask in conceptual ideas and fleeting trends, a woman in Seoul resurrects what you prefer to forget. Joung Young-Ju does not paint landscapes, she exhumes souls. This Korean artist born in 1970 sculpts directly on crumpled hanji paper the last witnesses of a humanity that modernity relentlessly tries to bury under concrete and steel. Her makeshift villages, her slums illuminated in the twilight, are not mere nostalgic evocations. They embody a poetic resistance to what Jean-François Lyotard called the “postmodern condition” [1].
In The Postmodern Condition published in 1979, the French philosopher diagnosed the end of the grand narratives that structured our Western societies. No more unifying myths, no more collective emancipation projects, only fragments of meaning and scattered “little narratives” struggling to give coherence to the world. This analysis, formulated in the context of the nascent computerization of developed societies, finds a disturbing echo today in the work of Joung Young-Ju. For her paintings flourish precisely in this space of desolation that Lyotard anticipated: where the old tales of progress and urban development have given way to an infinity of fragile individual destinies, glittering behind the windows of slums destined for demolition.
The artist does not hide the autobiographical origin of her inspiration. Born in the poor suburbs of Seoul, she grew up amid these shanty villages that Korean economic expansion in the 1980s and 1990s would methodically raze. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, this France which gave her the conceptual tools to think about her own condition, she returned home with the fresh gaze of the exile. Climbing Namsan Mountain and contemplating the South Korean capital at dusk, she grasped the epic dimension of these lights flickering in the darkness. Each bright spot tells a life story, each leaning house carries within it the dreams and despairs of its invisible inhabitants.
This panoramic vision is no accident. It follows the line of the Proustian tradition where involuntary memory arises to reveal the true nature of time and existence. For Marcel Proust, in In Search of Lost Time, masterfully demonstrated how a simple sensory detail, the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, could open the floodgates of memory and restore an entire era in its most intimate complexity [2]. For Joung Young-Ju, it is the rough texture of hanji paper, this traditional Korean material made from mulberry bark, that acts as the memory trigger. By crumpling, tearing, kneading these sheets before gluing them onto the canvas, the artist does not simply practice a technique: she performs a ritual of resurrection.
Joung Young-Ju’s creative process deserves close attention, as it reveals an art philosophy deeply rooted in Korean culture. Hanji is not chosen by chance; this millennial paper, traditionally used to wallpaper the interiors of houses, possesses unique properties of light absorption and thermal regulation. By using it as the raw material for her urban paintings, the artist establishes a symbolic continuity between traditional housing and the contemporary slums she depicts. The folds and creases she imposes on the paper before applying it to the canvas mimic aging, the wear of time, but also the resilience of materials that have endured through the centuries. This tactile, almost sculptural dimension transforms each work into a hybrid object where painting and relief, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, blend together.
The Proustian influence does not stop at this sensory dimension of the creative process. It permeates the very conception that Joung Young-Ju has of art and time. Like the narrator of the Recherche, who discovers late that only writing can save time from oblivion, the Korean artist understands that her paintings constitute the only bulwark against the programmed disappearance of these precarious worlds. Marcel Proust wrote: “The real paradise is the paradise we’ve lost.” For Joung Young-Ju, these makeshift villages she has been painting since 2008 represent exactly that: a lost world that must be wrested from oblivion, not out of sterile nostalgia, but because it contains essential values that triumphant modernity tends to trample. This Korean version of the “search for lost time” is accomplished in a plastic gesture of rare emotional intensity.
Because it’s not just about documenting the disappearance of these working-class neighborhoods. Joung Young-Ju’s work carries out a true poetic transfiguration of urban poverty. Her nocturnal compositions, bathed in a golden light that seems to emanate from the very bowels of the makeshift dwellings, confer an extraordinary dignity to these architectures of precariousness. The corrugated metal roofs, the bare concrete block walls, the shaky stairs winding between the houses, everything that official urban planning considers as tumors to be eliminated, acquires under her brush a melancholic beauty that recalls Proust’s most beautiful pages on the hawthorns of Combray or the water lilies of the Vivonne.
This aestheticization of poverty might seem questionable if it were not carried by an explicit political vision. Joung Young-Ju does not hide that her paintings constitute a form of resistance to the programmed erasure of these working-class communities. In a South Korea that has become one of Asia’s most developed economies, the persistence of these pockets of poverty raises questions. The artist carefully avoids any Manichaeism: she does not demonize urban progress, but she makes visible what it tends to obscure. Her works function as necessary counter-shots to the official narrative of the “Korean miracle”.
It is precisely here that the reference to Lyotard takes on its full relevance. The French philosopher had identified in the postmodern condition the end of what he called “metanarratives”, those grand totalizing stories that gave meaning to collective history. The narrative of progress, emancipation through science and technology, the inexorable march towards a better world, all of this collapsed with the catastrophes of the 20th century. In this context of “crisis of legitimation,” Lyotard advocated revaluing the “little narratives”, those local, singular stories that escape the totalitarian logic of grand narratives. The work of Joung Young-Ju fully fits within this perspective. In opposition to the metanarrative of Korean urban development, she presents a multitude of individual micro-narratives embodied by these illuminated windows that punctuate her canvases.
But the artist goes further than Lyotard in her reflection on the contemporary condition. Where the philosopher merely noted the fragmentation of meaning, she proposes a form of poetic recomposition. Her urban landscapes, although they represent precarious spaces, exude a troubling serenity. This apparent peace is nothing like resignation; it comes from a form of reconciliation with the fragility of the human condition. By refusing to make the inhabitants of her compositions disappear (contrary to what has been written, human figures are present, but internalized, made perceptible only by the presence of these domestic lights), Joung Young-Ju suggests that the true wealth of a society is not measured by its skyscrapers but by its ability to preserve spaces of ordinary humanity.
This philosophy of the ordinary is rooted in a specifically Asian sensibility that deserves to be highlighted. Unlike Western art, which tends to dramatize or heroize its subjects, Joung Young-Ju’s painting cultivates a form of contemplative humility that evokes the greatest achievements of Zen aesthetics. Her compositions, always built according to a principle of repetition and variation, establish a visual rhythm that invites meditation rather than analysis. One thinks of those Japanese gardens where every stone, every moss, every leaf participates in a harmonious whole without losing its own singularity. Likewise, each house in Joung Young-Ju’s paintings exists both as an element of a whole and as an individual microcosm bearing its own story.
This contemplative dimension must not mask the artist’s technical sophistication. Her use of hanji reveals consummate mastery of material and texture effects. By layering crumpled paper before applying the acrylic, she creates subtle reliefs that catch the light unpredictably. This technique, which she developed since her Parisian study years, allows her to achieve effects of depth and colored vibration of rare subtlety. Ochres, browns, and golds blend on these irregular surfaces to produce a chromatic range of infinite richness that evokes both the patinas of time and the warmth of domestic hearths.
The recent evolution of Joung Young-Ju’s work confirms the accuracy of this approach. Her most recent works, notably exhibited at Almine Rech in London at the end of 2024, testify to a deepening of her artistic research. The formats have grown larger, the compositions have become more complex, but above all, light takes on an increasing importance. These golden glimmers piercing the urban darkness no longer merely indicate a human presence; they seem to carry within them a form of universal hope. The artist herself acknowledges it: “Gradually, the light extends more outward and illuminates more broadly.”
This luminist evolution can be read as an artistic response to the geopolitical upheavals of our time. At a time when Asian metropolises assert themselves as the new centers of the world, where Seoul competes with Tokyo and Hong Kong to embody triumphant modernity, Joung Young-Ju’s work reminds us that this economic success cannot make us forget its human foundations. Her illuminated slums function as urban memento mori: they remind us that all greatness is built on fragility, and that authentic art’s mission is to keep this memory alive.
It is in this sense that Joung Young-Ju’s work far exceeds its Korean context to acquire a universal dimension. As a critic rightly noted during her London exhibition, “every major city in the world shelters its slums, whether it be the favelas of Rio, the gecekondu of Istanbul, or the slums of Detroit.” By choosing to focus on these marginalized spaces, the artist touches upon something essential in the contemporary urban condition. Her collages of indistinct rooftops evoke all the other slums worldwide and reveal the existence of a common humanity beyond cultural differences.
This universalist dimension does not prevent the work from remaining deeply rooted in its specific context. The use of hanji, the constant reference to the “daldongne” (moon villages) of the Seoul suburbs, and the color palette inspired by Korean sunsets, all these elements firmly anchor Joung Young-Ju’s paintings in a particular geography and culture. It is precisely this successful articulation between the local and the universal that gives her work its artistic impact. By painting her little corner of Korea with infinite care, she manages to say something essential about the human condition in general.
The spiritual, almost mystical dimension that emanates from these works must also be emphasized. Joung Young-Ju does not hide it: her Catholic upbringing has profoundly marked her worldview. Without being a believer in the strict sense, she retains from this religious education an unshakable faith in “eternity and the power of the spirit.” This transcendent dimension irrigates her paintings with a particular light. Her nocturnal villages bathe in a clarity that is not only physical but metaphysical. One detects traces of a quest for the absolute that evokes the most beautiful passages of Proust on art as a revelation of a higher truth.
This spiritual quest is also expressed in the particular conception the artist has of infinity. Unlike most landscape painters who clearly delimit their compositions, Joung Young-Ju systematically lets her villages overflow beyond the limits of the canvas. “I don’t like there to be an end,” she explains. “I want the world I paint to be eternal, which is why I draw the houses and the lights even in the distance.” This aesthetic of the unlimited transforms each work into a fragment of a larger universe, a window open onto an urban cosmos that seems to extend infinitely. The viewer is thus invited to mentally continue the landscape beyond the edges of the frame, to imagine the continuation of these alleys and rooftops to the far reaches of the horizon.
It remains to be wondered about the future of such an artistic approach. In a South Korea completing its urban metamorphosis, what will become of this painting of precariousness when the last slums have been razed? The artist herself seems to have anticipated this question. Her recent works increasingly integrate natural elements, bare trees and bare hills, which may announce an evolution towards landscapes less exclusively urban. “I plan to paint a landscape including nature, with the idea that nature will also disappear, as my hometown is disappearing,” she confides. This extension of the thematic range testifies to an ecological awareness that further broadens the scope of her artistic message.
Because that is indeed what ultimately makes Joung Young-Ju great: her ability to transform an apparently anecdotal subject, the disappearance of Seoul’s poor neighborhoods, into a universal meditation on the fragility of all human things. Her paintings function as urban elegies that sing the hidden beauty of what our era relentlessly destroys. In this, they fit into the great tradition of art as poetic resistance to the reign of pure utility. They remind us that behind every lit window hides an irreplaceable universe, and that the true wealth of a civilization is measured by its capacity to preserve these threatened universes. In a world where financial logic tends to homogenize everything, Joung Young-Ju’s work constitutes a bastion of singularity and humanity that must be celebrated.
- Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1979
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Paris, Gallimard, 1913-1927
