Zihu Fashion | Kim Hyun Jung’s Portrait of Korea: Inner Beauty — Perfect Rest After a Solo Meal
Korean painter Kim Hyun Jung published an artist's note on her work 'Naesoong: The Perfect Table,' which takes the 'eating alone' culture of single-person households as its subject. Through the image of a woman in hanbok eating jjajangmyeon and sweet-and-sour pork at a table made from a delivery box, she explains that the painting depicts a moment of rest meant entirely for herself, not for others to see.
전체 본문 보기
Korean society today keeps repeating the same philosophy of life: "even if you're alone, eat well and live well." Companies talk about individual work-life balance, and the media packages eating and drinking alone as a lifestyle for a new generation. But behind this seemingly light, fashionable language lies a body and mind already exhausted. Eating alone is less a freedom than a reality people have been forced to grow used to. It is also a shadow cast by today's labor structures — people are denied even the room to sit down unhurried and share a meal with someone else. Society keeps urging people to "learn to take care of themselves," yet the time, money, and energy that actually sustain that self-care are quietly pushed back onto the individual. What the exhausted reach for is not an expensive resort or some distant escape, but simply a familiar page in a delivery app. A society that keeps shouting "love yourself" ends up reducing even the most basic rest to a question of how well a person manages herself. This contradiction has always left me uneasy.
As a Korean painter, I wanted to turn this unease into an image of a private meal. Not a banquet scene from a traditional folding screen, not a grand table symbolizing reunion, but a woman using a parcel-delivery box as her table, facing jjajangmyeon and sweet-and-sour pork alone. She wears a neat, elegant hanbok jacket, yet her posture is anything but proper. She leans back on the floor at an angle, one leg stretched out carelessly, her eyes drifting absent-mindedly over the short videos auto-playing on her phone. This is far from the "healing imagery" we're used to seeing in advertisements. But I have come to believe that the true face of rest only surfaces in moments like this — a little disheveled, a little slack, even somewhat disorderly. This is not a table meant to be shown to others, but a private stage allowed only for herself. The work Naesoong: The Perfect Table pushes that "I" sitting at the center of this stage to the very front of the painting.
The true heart of this painting is the delivery box. This disposable cardboard box, almost without disguise, exposes the temporariness and improvisation of our lives. Like the corrugated boxes piled up at the door today and hauled away tomorrow, our rest, too, is always built on some makeshift arrangement. Coming home after overtime, anxious about the next morning, hastily swallowing a late-night meal — this is not a table carefully prepared for family, but the most immediate choice made just to prop up an exhausted body. The dark, heavy sauce of the jjajangmyeon and the glistening sheen on the sweet-and-sour pork sit far from the repeatedly extolled virtues of "health" and "moderation." And yet this meal remains a small but real ritual — one that lets a person confirm she is still alive, still holding onto some minimal sense of existence within this day-after-day exhaustion. The short videos auto-playing on the phone screen are like a faint, persistent signal from within, saying "I want to stop thinking for a moment." Here, "perfect" means neither a balance of taste and nutrition nor refinement and dignity, but finally having a brief moment of mental blankness — no need to judge, no need to respond, no need to keep putting on a brave face.
The "perfect table" imagined by society still remains fixed on the scene of a family gathered for dinner. And at the center of that table, there is almost always a mother — endlessly refilling dishes, reheating side dishes gone cold, portioning out food to suit each family member's taste. This labor is always dressed up in the name of "love," polished into the virtue of "devotion." Yet this toil is almost never truly repaid. No one clears time for her to rest; no one shares the weight of her domestic labor. I despise this unspoken, unaccountable arrangement. So in Naesoong: The Perfect Table, this woman is no longer named as anyone's mother or anyone's wife. She is simply an "I" who has made it through today, alone before a table that belongs entirely to her own taste. Here, "perfect" no longer depends on whether it satisfies others' expectations, but on whether that stretch of time finally belongs to herself alone. However brief, however small, as long as that moment truly belongs to her, it is already precious enough.
And the word "Naesoong" in the title quietly flips the scene once again. In the outside world, she always manages herself with a restrained tone and a proper posture. At a gathering, she smiles and says, "I'm full," and gently sets down her chopsticks; at the office, she keeps up an expression that is busy yet composed, exhausted yet presentable. But once the door closes and she is finally alone, the appetite and preferences she has long suppressed finally have a chance to show their true face. She pours the sweet-and-sour sauce over the pork without hesitation, scraping every last bit of black bean sauce from the bottom of the bowl. This is clearly at odds with the "gentle refinement" society expects of her. But I do not want to treat this departure as some shameful lapse. On the contrary, I have always believed that a person's desire appears most honest, most moving, precisely in gaps like this. In Naesoong: The Perfect Table, what is peeled away is exactly that composed, self-possessed mask, revealing instead a real, hungry self. "Perfect" here no longer means a flawless, impeccable image, but the quiet words a person can finally say to herself once she has stepped outside others' gaze — "I made it through today, too." Reclaiming this small but real right is exactly the question this table poses, and exactly where this work truly wants to arrive.
Korean painter Kim Hyun Jung (Source: Kim Hyun Jung Art Center)
Korean painter Kim Hyun Jung graduated from Sun Hwa Arts Middle and High School and went on to study in the Department of Oriental Painting at Seoul National University, completing her doctoral coursework in the university's graduate school. She is widely known for her Naesoong series, which portrays the everyday customs of 21st-century Korea, deftly capturing the textures and emotional layers of contemporary Korean life with a touch that combines humor and satire, and continuing to respond to social realities and the mood of the times through the lens of a "portrait of Korea." She has appeared as the "Bun Unnie" on the EBS program Haeyo Hwa Haeyo, and serves as a publicity ambassador for the City of Seoul and the Bridge of Hope. In recent years she has also engaged with roughly 300,000 followers across social media, and through a steady stream of exhibitions at home and abroad, continues to expand the expressive range and reach of Korean painting within a contemporary context.