Hello. I’m Ayeon Jung, an artist who revisits the scenes that are easy to overlook in everyday life, through a sensibility for light and color. I love catching the moments that suddenly feel striking within familiar scenery and preserving them in paint.

When I begin a piece, I look first to the sensibility of light and air rather than the form of the scene itself. Rather than faithfully reproducing buildings or objects, I tend to work by focusing on how a particular scene is remembered, in terms of temperature and color. I then decide on a focal element within the frame, and build the overall mood by bringing the surrounding colors and forms into harmony. Even when working from a real scene, I think what defines my process is how I expand and reinterpret color so that the impression and sensation I felt can come through more vividly.

This work began with the scenery of Yongsan, where Amorepacific’s headquarters stands. Drawing on the streets of Seoul and the Yongsan landscape, I tried to express the light, air, and sense of movement that flow through the city, in colors that are my own. I wanted to focus on how a familiar urban scene can feel entirely different depending on the time and the movement within it. We may walk the same streets over and over, but I don’t think we ever really see the same scene twice. Even in the brief moment you pause, the light and air have shifted, and the movement of people and cars changes without cease. I believe those small changes are what make the city feel new at every moment, and I tried to capture one of those fleeting moments.

I don’t think beauty has to exist only in something special or fully formed. If anything, I feel there’s undiscovered beauty in the moments we’ve grown so accustomed to that we pass right by them. The city moves quickly, and we live within that flow. Sometimes, though, a particular scene finds its way into your heart with unexpected clarity. I think that instant is where new beauty begins. I hope readers will discover their own beautiful moments within their everyday lives.

I felt it resonated strongly with what I’ve always pursued in my own work. For me, beauty doesn’t begin with creating something entirely new; it starts with looking at what already exists through a different perspective. And I think finding beauty is less about measuring up to a fixed standard, and more about discovering what moments you respond to, and which scenes your heart lingers on. With this work, too, I wanted to bring that sensibility to the urban landscape. Just as the same street can come to you as a flow on some days and as stillness on others, I believe beauty can be discovered differently through each person’s own gaze and sensibility, rather than being defined by a single standard.

I make an effort not to miss the scenes that stay with me in everyday life. Light or color that my gaze lingers on for no particular reason, the quality of the air at a certain hour — these things become important elements of my sensibility. So before trying to create something new, I try to look again at what’s already around me. Isn’t a sensibility that is uniquely your own something that becomes clearer, little by little, through the slow process of discovering what you keep responding to?

It was meaningful to be able to connect the sensibility of ‘memorable moments in everyday life,’ something I’ve always valued in my work, with the kind of beauty that Amorepacific talks about. In particular, the process of capturing not only the space as a collection of buildings, but also the time of day, the air, and the surrounding landscape of Seoul within which that space exists. All of that felt like a natural meeting point with the way I work.

I think that if you slowly get to know the things you love and the sensations that put you at ease, you’ll find that beauty that is uniquely yours has been accumulating all along. Set aside the rush to reach a quick conclusion, and take a moment to notice what moves you in your everyday life. Just as a familiar scene can suddenly look entirely different, there may still be beauty within us that has yet to be discovered. I hope that through this work, you might take a quiet moment to recall a scene from your own everyday life that somehow stayed with you.