Vogue | #Vogue 20: Naesoong — A Guidebook to Worries
For its 20th anniversary, the August 2016 issue of Vogue Korea presented the special feature 'Another VOGUE,' in which 20 artists were each given five keywords — Vogue, fashion, trend, Seoul, 20 — and freely commissioned to create a new work. Korean painter Kim Hyun Jung presented a new piece for this feature titled 'Naesoong: A Guidebook to Worries.' Through the image of a woman lying on a messy floor reading Vogue while dressed in formal hanbok, she depicted the conflicted mind of someone chasing the era's trends yet unable to fully keep up.
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Naesoong: A Guidebook to Worries
I paint genre pictures on the theme of today's people's worries. I hope that whenever this is, people can look back and give a wry smile at what was trendy at the time. On the surface we wear formal hanbok, but in reality we hold all kinds of desires — I paint this side of us through the 'Naesoong series.' Naesoong is a word close to 'gaze.' Because we feel that gaze, we express our inner feelings differently, and naesoong is born. Magazines contain the most cutting-edge trends of the era, but in reality, we end up reading them lying in an oddly messy room. We read magazines to keep up with culture and art, yet at the same time worry that we can't keep up. This piece honestly captures the real me, at the tail end of my twenties.