Landscapes of the mind,
drawn in lacquer

Jeong Chaehui began in Western painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University. The first widening of that frame came in Beijing, where she completed a graduate degree in mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Mural work asks a different set of questions than easel painting: about scale, about surface, about how an image lives on a wall rather than within a frame.

It was through this study that she was drawn to the artistic values of East Asia, and to the materials and techniques that carry them. Over years she visited old temples and sites across China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia, treating tradition not as a subject to depict but as a body of knowledge to absorb. The mural — a public, durable, material image — became the bridge between the painter she had trained as and the lacquer artist she would become.

The decisive turn came in 2003, on her return to Korea from China. Across the entire third floor of Gallery Artside she presented what is regarded as the country's first full-scale solo exhibition of lacquer painting and lacquer murals. From that point lacquer — ottchil, the sap of the lacquer tree — became her principal material rather than one technique among many.

Lacquer is slow and exacting. It demands controlled humidity to cure, layer upon layer, each coat building toward a depth that paint cannot imitate. In Jeong's hands this is not craft display but a way of thinking: the surface remembers every layer beneath it. The deep, lustrous tone is not applied at the end; it accumulates as the image is made.

Recognition followed across borders. She received an award at the Ishikawa International Urushi (石川國際漆展) Exhibition in Japan, was an invited artist at the Kottayam international mural festival in South India in 2013, and from 2005 to 2006 held residency at the MMCA Goyang Art Studio — confirmation that a tradition pursued this seriously speaks across the region that shares it.

What lacquer paints, in Jeong's work, is not a scene observed but a scene remembered. Titles across her solo exhibitions trace this inward weather — 〈Landscape Beyond〉 (2020), 〈Breath, Rest〉 (2021), 〈A Bittersweet Leaf〉 (2023). These are landscapes of the mind: the experiences of a life held still long enough to be looked at.

The medium is suited to it. Because lacquer accumulates depth slowly, it holds time the way memory does — not as a single image but as sediment. Jeong extends this beyond the flat surface, working the material into relief and installation, so that the inner landscape is given not only a colour but a body.

From Western painting at Seoul National University, through murals in Beijing, to lacquer, the line of her work is a single sustained study of how an Asian tradition can carry a contemporary inner life. She joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — so that others who work with patience and slow materials might do so without the weight of financial exclusion.