Again, for Elegy
Hayoung Eum, 《My, Pretty》​

 

 

 

 

Jaeyeon Cho | Art Critic, Senior Editor at Art in Culture자

​​​

It can be stated, without hesitation, that Hayoung Eum’s painting begins by passing reality through an X-ray. Seen in this way, reality becomes a site where narratives once clinging like skin and meanings that ought to have flowed like blood are stripped away, leaving only the bare bones of signs and geometry. It is a world so desiccated that it approaches a vacuum. “There is nothing but the fact that it was painted.” Before this confession, how are we to read these works? They may be understood, in a broad sense, as elegies. Not because they narrate loss, but because they emerge from the recognition that life is neither a narrative neatly organized by cause and effect, nor a place where meaning is granted at the end like a reward. Yet this elegiac tone does not resolve into resignation. What it conceals, rather, is an ongoing tension—a struggle between Hayoung Eum and life itself. As suggested in the artist’s note, there is a paradox at work: as memory fades, and as the language to articulate it disappears, sensation becomes all the more pure, more precise, more true. This paradox defines her attitude toward life. Stories, in the end, are fragile. Values, too. But their absence does not render life fragile. One need not produce countless episodes or lessons, as if to justify a life. Even without them, life remains—sufficiently, quietly—pretty.

Hayoung Eum’s gaze resists easy definition. It cannot be reduced to that of resistance, for it does not conceal a certain warmth toward its subject; nor can it be called a gaze of fascination, for it remains distinctly cold. It exists, rather, in this tension. While accepting the loss of narrative and meaning as inevitable, her gaze remains transparent, piercing through what lies beneath. This way of seeing recalls, perhaps, the logic of fashion design. It is a gaze that looks through the seams hidden within vividly colored fabrics, and even beyond them—toward the bare patterns and measurements that remain after the stitches are removed: signs and geometry. Through this gaze, Hayoung Eum de-designs a life that has been elaborately constructed through narrative and meaning. In traditional aesthetics, beauty has been understood to encompass both the cognitive (narrative) and the ethical (meaning). Here, however, as narrative and meaning are stripped away, beauty itself begins to shift. It is no longer sustained in its former terms, but reduced, lightened—into what might simply be called “pretty.” My, Pretty begins precisely at this point. There are those who resist such work—work that asks not to be read, but to be felt—and such a response is understandable. Yet Hayoung Eum does not substitute a poverty of imagination with aestheticism. This bareness is not a lack, but a decision: the most precise way of approaching the “prettiness” inherent in life when it is left bare.

 

Wonderfalls (2026) may be read as a linguistic play on wonderful: wonder falls. In this work, familiar motifs appear—images that seem to invite us to artificially complete narrative and meaning. Yet such attempts lead only into a maze of interpretation. Rather than filling in what is missing, these elements ask to be received as they are. What, then, does the painting “actually” present? A stage with its curtain withdrawn; two houses and two clouds; a cone floating above a dry wall; the number 4; the word SHINES. This enumeration of seemingly unrelated objects shows little interest in constructing a situation. The work does not aim at narrative or meaning, but at the transmission of affect—what the artist describes as something that “remains only as a form of atmosphere or sensation, difficult to explain: the fleeting energy of a moment when memory and emotion brush past.” The relationships between these elements may appear disjointed, even absurd, as if composing a surreal landscape. Yet this is not unfamiliar. It belongs to the very structure of memory. Recall a distant, tender moment from the past. What remains is not the figure of a person, nor the full account of an event, nor even the path once walked. Time has stripped away narrative, leaving only fragmented images drifting in suspension. The wonder of that day has already fallen. And yet, this is enough. Even in their bareness, these fragments allow a moment of life to shine. Like the sheep in the box from The Little Prince, a single house can evoke both a childhood family and one’s present household; a cloud alone can carry the sensation that the air of that day persists into the present. The number 4 may function as a kind of coordinate. In a world where the coordinates of narrative and meaning have been lost, even such a minor marker allows us to arrive—again and again—at what is most true.

Across its many definitions, design shares a common premise: it imposes order upon things in order to serve a specific purpose. From this perspective, when a de-designing gaze passes through an object, what is stripped away are precisely those layers—purpose (meaning) and order (narrative)—that cling to its refined surface. In Paradise (2026), two flowers appear, along with the field in which they bloom, and mountain peaks rising behind them. All are rendered as if seen through such a gaze. The flowers bear none of the organic veins one would expect; the field and the mountains lack the dense complexity of vegetation. Within a design-oriented, teleological worldview, the mountain exists to hold water and nourish the field; the field yields nutrients to bring forth the flower; the flower, in turn, scatters seeds that return to the field and the mountain. A chain of causality in which each becomes both means and end for the other. Yet under a de-designing vision, these three elements cease to serve one another’s narratives and meanings. On the canvas, they stand without context—reduced to their own masses and planes of color. Isolated, independent, they remain, starkly upright. But this solitude does not read as tragic loneliness. There is, instead, a cool and lucid sense of release—the possibility of existing wholly as oneself, without recognition from others or assigned meaning. No one pities those who fall into forbidden love. No one truly believes Darwin when he says that humans were not created for a divine purpose. No one fully understands the poet who leaves behind only signs and numbers. And yet, in solitude, they do not return. Because life was always theirs.

The artist cannot fully control the work. The work exceeds the artist’s intention, and the viewer’s interpretation exceeds it once again. A double, and perhaps productive, betrayal. If so, might the freedom that releases the image from narrative and meaning extend further—allowing it, through the viewer, to pass once more through concepts? Perhaps the achievement of Hayoung Eum’s painting lies not in declaring a freedom from concepts, but in holding open a passage—a door—through which image and concept may move in both directions. My Buttons (2026) offers a point of departure. As noted, the artist turns away from statement and toward description. A button, originally made to control a mechanism, is here stripped bare—freed from its assigned function. Reduced to a sign, to geometry, it releases not only itself but also the hand that would turn the dial from the obligation of purpose. Freedom begins to spread across the entire surface. Within this vacuum-like stage, one may betray the artist’s intention and assign new purposes to the “stars” scattered across the canvas—inscribing new narratives, new meanings. A star may become a compass for the lost, or a sign that holds someone’s quiet longing. A “button” for life itself—something to be pressed, to be lived on one’s own terms. If such stars—these buttons of life—exist here, on the ground we inhabit, then it is only natural that objects bound to function, and the hands that serve them, begin to lose their clarity.

To conclude: Hayoung Eum’s painting unfolds within a tension between the non-narrative and the meaningless. The absence of a story that explains causality, and of meaning that might assign value to it, does not simply result in a refusal of interpretation. Rather, her work prompts us to construct, for ourselves, stories that might hold meaning. With only signs and geometry, among indifferent flowers, beneath sparse starlight, we find ourselves able to recover a sense of “prettiness” we had forgotten. Her paintings are meaningless—and precisely in that, they are pretty. If life has no inherent meaning, then perhaps the task is not to discover it, but to assign it. A life without given purpose, without declared necessity, remains bare, almost skeletal. And yet, one continues to believe that there is a reason to live. Because we have chosen—to endure today, to go on living. Again, for elegy.