Jeon Daesung

JEON DAESUNG (전대성) was born in South Korea in 1969. He began painting at the age of fifteen and studied Western Painting at Jeonju University, graduating with a BFA in 1993. He has worked as a painter for more than four decades and lives in Gunsan.

His first solo exhibition was held at the Gunsan Citizens’ Cultural Center in 2012, followed by Dream in a Dream at Gallery Insa Art in Seoul in 2024 and an invitational exhibition in the Jeonju Hanok Village. He has taken part in more than 150 group exhibitions in Korea and abroad, among them the Seoul 600th Anniversary Invitational Exhibition, a three-country exhibition with Uzbekistan and China, and an invitational exhibition in New Zealand.

He was selected for the Korea Grand Art Exhibition and received the Excellence Award at the New Art Grand Exhibition. His sculptures Goddess of Justice stand at Chung-Ang University and at the Daejeon Law Theme Park, and his work is held by the City of Gunsan.

His current body of work, LINE – The Invisible Connection, deals with the relationships that hold existence together but remain unseen: love, memory, motherhood, and the moment of creation. In Korean the line he draws is seon (線); another seon (禪) names the tradition of meditative practice. In his painting the two meet, as one line follows another and drawing turns into meditation.

“I do not begin with a finished image in mind. I struggle, erase, draw again and endure before the canvas. Somewhere within that repetition thought begins to fade and the boundary between myself and the painting becomes uncertain. Then, sometimes, something appears: a colour I did not plan, a line I did not search for. The lines on my canvas are not LINE itself. Canvas is matter, paint is matter, my body is matter, and I can only approach the invisible through the visible. I do not draw lines. I reveal the connections that already exist.”