Haru K, Jaeyoung Park, Songnyeo Lyoo: Summer splash

Summer Splash brings together three Korean artists — Jaeyoung Park, Haru K, and Songnyeo Lyoo — to explore the textures, symbols, and surreal undertones of summer. In their hands, the season becomes a layered stage where memory, desire, and unexpected humor converge. Through visual languages shaped by pop sensibility, cultural layering, and quiet surrealism, Summer Splash reflects on how fleeting pleasures can be reimagined — sometimes playfully, sometimes hauntingly — in paint.

Jaeyoung Park channels the brightness and energy of summer through rhythmic brushwork and saturated color. His scenes of outdoor leisure — swimming pools, radiant skies, and familiar objects like a knitted donut-shaped float — radiate immediacy and warmth. These compositions carry a tactile quality, as if sunlight itself has been captured on canvas.

Haru K reinterprets the compositional logic of traditional East Asian landscape painting, infusing it with contemporary imagery: food, domestic items, and his recurring “mini-me” figures. Playful shifts in scale and repeated forms turn these layered landscapes into quiet meditations on material desire and identity, where symbolism and satire subtly intertwine.

Songnyeo Lyoo conjures poetic, utopian worlds in seasonal settings such as gardens and beaches. Working in traditional ink and color on hanji paper, she populates her scenes with hybrid creatures, symbolic forms, and vivid palettes. Her compositions balance fantastical content with formal clarity, drawing viewers into immersive, dreamlike spaces.

Each artist reframes summer through a distinct lens, turning transient experiences into rich, layered compositions. Summer Splash is a reminder of painting’s power to preserve, expand, and transform the fleeting joys, memories, and fantasies that shape our lives, leaving an afterimage as vivid as the season itself.