Harin Jeon: Explores fragile identity through human and animal figures shaped by memory and emotion.

Harin works between Seoul and London, and completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024. Her work draws from the people and landscapes she encounters in her daily life in London. Her paintings often center on animal figures derived from childhood memories, responding to the environments that surround them. She is particularly interested in how these responses manifest as emotion, layering them with her own personal narrative. As a migrant, Harin has experienced a collapse of boundaries—between herself and others, as well as between social norms and structures that once felt absolute. Through this dislocation, she began to question the frameworks that had defined her sense of identity, revealing the self as something fragile and unstable. This shift produces an emotional intensity that she visualizes through metaphorical representations of human and animal figures. Her paintings explore the psychological flow that follows the fracturing of the self, where emotional exchanges between figures are suggested through expressive gestures and painterly marks. Memories drawn from childhood, including fairy tales and moments of leisure, reappear within the landscapes of London, shaped by longing and a desire to return to a maternal sense of comfort. These elements give rise to dreamlike atmospheres. Influenced by her background in textiles, her paintings evoke a tactile sensibility, as if multiple surfaces were woven together. Within her work, animals, objects, landscapes, and human figures exist in fluid and interdependent relationships. They shift between interacting and dissolving. It allows differences to emerge within a shared pictorial space.