Painting Spring From Memory

Why It Matters

The show illustrates how personal narrative and spontaneous creation can revitalize urban art scenes, attracting collectors seeking authentic, emotionally charged pieces that bridge cultural and seasonal divides.

Key Takeaways

• Artist uses spring landscapes to counter New York winter gloom
• Childhood in rural South Korea fuels lifelong nature-inspired artistic vision
• Paintings serve as “mind landscapes,” reflecting inner emotional terrain
• No sketches; ideas emerge spontaneously during intuitive, dialogic painting process
• Recent works titled “Joy” and “Aelia Spring” celebrate seasonal renewal

Summary

The video introduces “Aelia Spring,” a solo exhibition where the artist deliberately injects the vitality of spring into New York’s bleak February. Drawing on her upbringing in rural South Korea, she frames the show as a personal antidote to seasonal cold.

Throughout the talk she explains that landscape functions as a proxy for emotion, turning external scenery into “mind landscapes” that map inner human terrain. She emphasizes an unmediated process—no sketches, no pre‑planning—allowing ideas to surface spontaneously as she paints, turning each canvas into a dialogue.

She cites two recent pieces, “Joy” and an unnamed work added at the last minute, both completed in December yet meant to evoke spring’s optimism. The artist describes the act of painting as a conversation with the canvas, where observation and response shape the final image.

By merging personal memory with seasonal symbolism, the exhibition underscores how contemporary artists can translate private experience into universal visual language, offering viewers a hopeful counterpoint to urban winter and reinforcing the market’s appetite for emotionally resonant work.

Original Description

Meet Jongsuk Yoon, whose paintings draw from memories of nature from her childhood in Onyang, South Korea. In 'Azalea Spring', now on view at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, she paints what she calls “landscapes of the soul” — images shaped less by observation than by memory, emotion, and the sensations of nature.

Rooted in the traditions of East Asian landscape painting and shaped by European modernism, Jongsuk’s process is intuitive and meditative. She doesn’t sketch or plan in advance. Instead, color and gesture lead the way. Large fields of pink, red, and yellow recall the feeling of spring while the paintings unfold as a dialogue between the artist and the canvas.

Jongsuk Yoon: Azalea Spring

Feb 6–Mar 21, 2026

Marian Goodman

New York 🇺🇸