The middle ground
where two surfaces meet
Thick layers built up, then scraped back.Relationship, conflict, and the slow work of compromise.
Build up, scrape back —
an abstraction of relationship
Jeong Jaecheol is a painter who graduated from the Department of Painting at Hongik University. The work belongs to abstraction, but it is an abstraction with a subject: relationship, conflict, and the long process of compromise that living alongside others demands.
The signature series, 〈Middle Ground〉, makes that subject visible through process rather than depiction. Jeong builds the surface up in thick layers of paint, then scrapes back into them — so that what was added and what was taken away remain legible side by side on the same plane. The painting is not a picture of a relationship; it is the residue of one.
The two physical gestures at the heart of the method — accumulation and erasure — carry the meaning of the work directly. To pile texture on is to assert; to scrape it away is to yield. Between the two, neither winning outright, a third register emerges: the worn, negotiated surface of the middle ground itself.
This is why the materiality of the paint matters so much in this practice. The ridges of impasto and the furrows left by scraping are not decoration; they are the trace of a process of friction and reconciliation, recorded at the speed the hand could manage. The viewer reads conflict and compromise not as a story but as a texture — something felt across the surface before it is understood.
In Jeong Jaecheol's abstraction, then, the act of painting and its subject are one and the same. To live with others is to add and to give up by turns, and the surface that results is never smooth. The middle ground is the honest record of that unevenness.
Major themes
- 1
〈Middle Ground〉
His signature abstract series — the worn, negotiated plane that emerges where two surfaces meet without either prevailing.
- 2
Building up & scraping back
Thick impasto is laid down and then scraped into — accumulation and erasure held together as the physical grammar of the work.
- 3
Conflict & compromise
Relationship rendered as texture — the friction and reconciliation of living together, read across the surface before it is understood.
Medium & method
- Abstract painting — a non-figurative practice with relationship and compromise as its subject.
- Thick texture (impasto): paint accumulated in heavy, ridged layers.
- Scraping (sgraffito): cutting back into the built surface so addition and removal stay visible together.
- Subject: relationship, conflict, and the process of compromise.
Education
- Graduated from the Department of Painting, Hongik University.
Three essays —
on texture, gesture, and the middle
1Accumulation and erasure — two gestures, one surface
The method at the centre of Jeong Jaecheol's work is deceptively simple: Jeong builds the surface up, and then takes it away. Thick paint is laid down in heavy layers; into those layers the artist scrapes, cutting back to what lies beneath. The two gestures are opposites, and both are kept visible on the same plane.
This is what gives the work its particular density. A smooth abstraction hides its making; Jeong's surfaces insist on theirs. The ridge of an impasto stroke and the furrow of a scrape sit next to each other as evidence of two contrary impulses — to add, to remove — that never fully cancel out. Each cancels a little of the other and leaves the rest standing.
Because nothing is sanded flat, the painting holds the time of its own argument. You can read, in the texture, where the hand pressed forward and where it pulled back. The surface is not a conclusion but a record of the back-and-forth that produced it — which is exactly why texture, rather than image, carries the meaning.
2〈Middle Ground〉 — the place neither side wins
The title of the signature series names a position rather than an image. A middle ground is what is left when two opposing parties stop short of total victory — the worn, common patch they end up sharing. It is not a compromise reached cleanly but one ground down into existence.
Jeong's paintings translate that idea into paint with unusual directness. The built-up layers stand in for assertion, the scraped-back passages for concession, and the surface that survives both is the middle ground itself — bearing the marks of everything added and everything given up. The plane is shared territory, and like all shared territory, it is uneven.
What keeps the series from being merely an illustration of an idea is that the meaning is enacted, not depicted. The conflict and the compromise are not pictured; they are performed, layer by layer, scrape by scrape, until the canvas itself becomes the middle ground that two surfaces have negotiated into being.
3The honesty of abstraction — texture as relationship
It would be easy to paint a relationship as a scene — two figures, a room, a gesture. Jeong Jaecheol declines that ease. By staying with abstraction, the artist refuses to settle the meaning into a single illustrated story and instead lets it remain in the open register of texture, where each viewer feels the friction before naming it.
This is a kind of honesty. Relationships are not, in truth, smooth narratives; they are accumulations and erasures, advances and concessions, and the surface they leave is rarely even. An abstraction made of built and scraped paint keeps faith with that unevenness in a way a tidy figurative scene could not.
Across the 〈Middle Ground〉 series, then, the painting and its subject become the same thing. To make the work is to add and to give up by turns; to look at it is to feel that process in the hand-built grain of the surface. What remains on the canvas is not a depiction of compromise but its actual, textured residue.
From the first built-up layer to the final scrape, Jeong Jaecheol's abstraction has pursued a single question: how does a surface hold the friction and reconciliation of living alongside others? The answer, worked in impasto and sgraffito across the 〈Middle Ground〉 series, is a texture in which conflict and compromise are not described but recorded. Jeong Jaecheol joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — so that the proceeds of the work might become a low-interest lifeline for artists facing financial exclusion today.
Selected Works
1 works are featured here.
Jeong Jaecheol 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.
