International News | Kim Hyun Jung’s Portraits of Korea: Inner Beauty – The Perfect Rest After Eating Alone

These days, Korean society keeps preaching a philosophy of life: ‘even alone, eat well and live well.’ Companies talk about individual work-life balance, and the media package eating alone and drinking alone as a new-generation lifestyle. But behind these seemingly light, fashionable words lies a body and mind already worn thin. Eating alone is less a freedom than a reality people have been forced into by habit. It is also a shadow cast by today’s labor structure — people are denied even the room to share an unhurried meal with others. Society keeps urging people to ‘learn to take care of themselves,’ yet the time, money, and energy that would actually sustain that self-care are quietly pushed back onto the individual. What the exhausted reach for is not an expensive resort or a distant escape, but a familiar page of menus on a delivery app. This society, which keeps shouting ‘love yourself,’ in fact reduces even the most basic rest to a question of whether the individual is skilled enough at self-management. This contradiction has always made me uneasy.

As a Korean painter, I wanted to turn this unease into an image of a private meal. Not a banquet scene on a traditional folding screen, nor a grand table symbolizing family reunion, but a woman who has made a delivery box her table, sitting alone before jjajangmyeon and sweet-and-sour pork. She wears a neat, elegant hanbok jacket, yet her posture is anything but composed. She leans back on the floor at an angle, one leg stretched out carelessly, her gaze drifting absently toward the short-form videos auto-playing on her phone. This is far from the ‘healing imagery’ we’re used to seeing in advertisements. And yet I believe that the true face of rest surfaces precisely in moments like this — a little disheveled, a little slack, even somewhat disordered. This is not a table meant to be shown to others, but a private stage allowed only to oneself. The work Naesoong: The Perfect Table pushes that ‘self’ sitting at the center of this stage to the very front of the picture.

What lies at the true heart of this painting is the delivery box. This disposable cardboard box lays bare, almost without concealment, the transience and improvisation of our lives. Like a pile of corrugated cardboard stacked at the door today and cleared away by tomorrow, our rest, too, is always built on some stopgap arrangement. Coming home after working overtime, worrying about the next morning, hastily swallowing a late-night meal — not a table carefully set for family, but the most direct choice made just to prop up an exhausted body. The thick black sauce of the jjajangmyeon and the glistening sheen of the sweet-and-sour pork are far from the repeatedly praised virtues of ‘health’ and ‘moderation.’ And yet this meal is still a small but real ritual, one that confirms a person is still alive, still holding on to some minimal sense of existence amid this day-after-day exhaustion. The short-form video auto-playing on the phone screen flickers on and off, faint but persistent, like an inner signal wanting to stop thinking for a moment. Here, ‘perfect’ means neither a balance of taste and nutrition nor refinement and dignity, but finally securing a brief moment of mental blankness — no need to judge, no need to respond, no need to keep pretending to hold it together.

Meanwhile, the ‘perfect table’ that society imagines still remains fixed on the scene of a family gathered around dinner. And at the center of that table, there is almost always a mother. She keeps adding food, reheating side dishes gone cold, and portioning out meals to suit each family member’s different taste. This labor is always dressed up in the name of ‘love,’ framed as the virtue of ‘devotion.’ And yet this toil is almost never truly repaid. No one carves out time for her to rest; no one shares the weight of her domestic labor. I dislike this tacit consent in which no one takes responsibility. So in Naesoong: The Perfect Table, this woman is no longer named as anyone’s mother or anyone’s wife. She is simply the ‘self’ who has endured today, sitting alone before a table entirely of her own taste. Here, ‘perfect’ no longer depends on whether she has met others’ expectations, but on whether that stretch of time finally belonged to herself alone. However brief, however small, as long as that moment truly belonged to her, it is already precious enough.

And the word ‘Naesoong’ in the title quietly flips the scene once more. In the outside world, she always manages herself with a restrained tone and a proper bearing. At a shared meal, she smiles and says ‘I’m full,’ then 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 left alone, the appetite and preferences she has long suppressed finally have the chance to show their true face. She pours the sweet-and-sour sauce over the pork without hesitation, and carefully scrapes up the last bit of black bean sauce at the bottom of the bowl. This is clearly at odds with the ‘gentle propriety’ society expects of her. But I don’t want to treat this departure as some shameful lapse. On the contrary, I have always believed that desire is 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, and what is revealed beneath it is a real, hungry self. Here, ‘perfect’ is no longer a flawless, impeccable image, but the moment when a person, briefly free of others’ gaze, can finally say quietly to herself: ‘I made it through today too.’ Reclaiming this small but real right is precisely the question this table poses — and precisely 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 Sunhwa Arts Middle and High School and went on to study in the Department of Oriental Painting at Seoul National University, later completing her doctoral coursework at the same graduate school. She is widely known for her Naesoong series, which portrays the everyday customs of 21st-century Korea, capturing the textures and emotional layers of contemporary Korean life with a touch that is both humorous and satirical, and she continues to respond to social realities and the mood of the times through the lens of ‘Portraits of Korea.’ She has been active as the ‘Bun-Wearing Unnie’ on the EBS program ‘Haeyo Hwa Haeyo,’ and also serves as a publicity ambassador for the City of Seoul and Bridge of Hope. In recent years she has continued to engage with roughly 300,000 followers across social media, and through a steady stream of exhibitions at home and abroad, has further expanded the boundaries of how Korean painting can express itself and reach audiences in a contemporary context.

글쓴이 — 책임편집 张佳佳