Passing & Passage —
crossing the threshold
She visualizes the sense of passing through and passing over.A trajectory that began in Le Havre and reaches toward AI design.
Passing, Passage —
a practice that crosses media
Park Ji-hye is an emerging artist who moves across painting and digital media. Her work began in France: she earned her bachelor's degree (DNAP) in fine art at L'École Supérieure d'Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen in 2010, after presenting painting, installation, and video work at the ESAH Gallery between 2008 and 2010.
Returning to Korea, she deepened her practice at Hongik University's Graduate School, Department of Painting — completing her master's degree in 2015 and her doctorate in 2025. Since 2024 she has been enrolled in the doctoral program of the AI Design Lab at Kookmin University's Graduate School of Techno Design, extending her inquiry from canvas into computational media.
Across this trajectory, two words recur: ‘Passing’ and ‘Passage’. Her 2013 and 2014 solo exhibitions at the Hangaram Art Museum carried those titles directly — Passing and Passage — naming a sustained preoccupation with the sense of passing through a boundary and of passing over into another state.
In 2024 her solo exhibition Visual Dialogue at the Hongik University Museum of Contemporary Art brought painting into conversation with digital tools, treating the canvas and the screen not as rivals but as a single field of flow. The boundary between media becomes, in her hands, a passage rather than a wall.
Major themes
- 1
Passing & Passage
The sense of passing through a boundary and passing over into another state — a motif carried through her solo exhibitions.
- 2
Crossing media
Painting and digital media treated as a single field of flow rather than rival camps — the canvas and the screen in dialogue.
- 3
From Le Havre to AI design
A trajectory from fine-art training in France to doctoral research in AI design — the practice keeps moving across thresholds.
The artist's timeline
- 2008–Presents painting, installation, and video at ESAH Gallery, France (through 2010).
- 2010Bachelor of fine art (DNAP), L'École Supérieure d'Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen.
- 2013Solo exhibition 〈Passing〉, Gallery Seven, Hangaram Art Museum.
- 2014Solo exhibitions 〈Passing〉 (Art Seoul) and 〈Passage〉 (Gallery Seven), Hangaram Art Museum; master's thesis exhibition.
- 2015Master's degree, Dept. of Painting, Hongik University Graduate School.
- 2024Solo exhibition 〈Visual Dialogue〉, Hongik University Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul.
- 2024–Doctoral program, AI Design Lab, Graduate School of Techno Design, Kookmin University.
- 2025Doctorate, Dept. of Painting, Hongik University Graduate School.
Selected exhibitions
- Solo: 〈Visual Dialogue〉, Hongik University Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2024)
- Solo: 〈Passing〉 (Art Seoul) & 〈Passage〉 (Gallery Seven), Hangaram Art Museum (2014); 〈Passing〉, Gallery Seven (2013)
- Group: 〈Reloaded〉, Dapsimni Art Lab, Korea Media Art Association (2025)
- Group: Asian Young Artists Exhibition, Sejong Center (Gwanghwamun International Art Festival) & Herald Arcade 15, Herald Auction (2024)
- Group: Hanam Fringe Art Fair (2023); 〈Art and Nature〉, Jardin suspendu au Havre, France (2010)
Three essays —
on the work and its thresholds
1Beginning in Le Havre — a practice rooted in two places
Park Ji-hye's practice begins in France. Between 2008 and 2010 she presented painting, installation, and video work at the ESAH Gallery, and in 2010 she earned her bachelor's degree in fine art (DNAP) from L'École Supérieure d'Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen — an art and design school in the port city of Le Havre.
That early period was not confined to the studio. In 2010 she took part in the group exhibition Art and Natureat the Jardin suspendu au Havre, placing her work in dialogue with a landscape — a hanging garden built into the city's old fortifications. The instinct to situate the work between a made image and a lived environment would persist.
Returning to Korea, she continued at Hongik University's Graduate School, Department of Painting. The two contexts — a French port city and a Seoul painting program — form the double root of a practice that has never settled into a single medium or a single place.
2Passing and Passage — the two words that name the work
Two English words recur across Park Ji-hye's exhibition history: Passing and Passage. In 2013 her solo exhibition Passing opened at Gallery Seven in the Hangaram Art Museum; in 2014 she returned to the same museum with both Passing (at Art Seoul) and Passage(at Gallery Seven), alongside her master's thesis exhibition.
The pairing is deliberate. Passing is the sense of moving through a threshold — the moment of crossing a boundary. Passage is both the passing-over into another state and the corridor that makes it possible. The titles do not describe a fixed subject so much as a sustained attention to transition itself.
Read together, the two exhibitions propose that an image is less a destination than a place one moves through — a way station rather than an endpoint. That proposition would later make the move from canvas to digital media feel less like a break than a continuation.
3From painting to AI design — extending the field
Park Ji-hye's recent trajectory carries the logic of passageinto her own working method. Having completed her master's (2015) and doctorate (2025) in painting at Hongik University, she enrolled in 2024 in the doctoral program of the AI Design Lab at Kookmin University's Graduate School of Techno Design.
Her 2024 solo exhibition Visual Dialogue, at the Hongik University Museum of Contemporary Art, stages this crossing directly. Painting is set in conversation with digital tools; the canvas and the screen are treated as a single field of flow rather than opposing camps. The same year she joined group exhibitions including the Asian Young Artists Exhibition at the Sejong Center and, in 2025, Reloaded with the Korea Media Art Association.
The throughline is consistent. Whether in painting or in computational media, the work attends to the moment of crossing — the threshold where one state becomes another. Park Ji-hye joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity, so that emerging artists who come after might cross those thresholds with less friction than they face today.
From a port city in France to an AI design lab in Seoul, Park Ji-hye's work has pursued a single sensation: the feeling of passing through, and passing over. Across painting, installation, video, and digital media, the threshold — not the destination — is the subject. She stands with this campaign as a fellow artist in solidarity, so that others might cross more freely.
Selected Works
2 works are featured here.
Park Ji-hye joined this campaign in solidarity with fellow artists. Every work sold flows directly into the artists' mutual-aid loan fund— a purchase becomes the next month's lifeline for an artist navigating financial exclusion today.
