Hyundai Motor | Audacious or Playful: The Twist of the Naesoong Girl
Hyundai Motor's in-house/brand magazine introduced Kim Hyun Jung's 'Naesoong' series under the title 'Audacious or Playful: The Twist of the Naesoong Girl,' describing how her work reinterprets Shin Yun-bok's Portrait of a Beauty for the present, placing hanbok-clad women in incongruous everyday situations — eating instant noodles, exercising, playing billiards — to explore the tension between social propriety and one's true self.
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Audacious or Playful: The Twist of the Naesoong Girl
A woman in elegant hanbok, hair done up in a traditional chignon, seems as though she should move with restraint and grace. Yet in Kim Hyun Jung's paintings, that same woman eats instant noodles straight out of the pot balanced on a delivery box, works out on exercise equipment in a neighborhood park, or leans over a pool table with one leg propped up, cue in hand. This is the world of her 'Naesoong' series, a contemporary reinterpretation of Shin Yun-bok's 'Portrait of a Beauty.'
The title 'Naesoong' — a Korean word for coy or demure pretense — captures the gap between the outward propriety hanbok symbolizes and the artist's candid, unfiltered inner self. Kim, a graduate of Seoul National University's departments of Business Administration and Oriental Painting, paints herself nude first and then dresses the figure in hand-dyed hanji (traditional Korean paper) collaged onto the canvas, rendering the fabric semi-transparently so the body's outline shows faintly through — a technique she developed by studying the way Goryeo Buddhist paintings depicted translucent robes. Since debuting her 'Naesoong' series in 2013, she has drawn wide public attention through social media, quickly establishing herself as a leading young voice in contemporary Korean painting.