Jaeyoung Park, Haru K, Songnyeo Lyoo: Summer splash

GALLERY EXHIBITION | Summer Splash brings together three Korean artists - Jaeyoung Park, Haru K, and Songnyeo Lyoo - whose practices explore the visual textures, cultural symbols, and surreal nuances of summer. In their works, summer is reconstructed as a space where memory, desire, and unexpected humor converge. Through visual languages shaped by pop sensibility, cultural layering, and surrealist undertones, Summer Splash reflects on how fleeting pleasures are reimagined - sometimes playfully, sometimes hauntingly - through the medium of painting.

Jaeyoung Park employs rhythmic brushwork and saturated color to express the brightness and energy of the season. His scenes of outdoor leisure, featuring swimming pools, radiant skies, and familiar objects like a knitted donut-shaped float convey both immediacy and warmth. These compositions evoke a tactile quality, as if capturing the sensation of sunlight in paint.

Haru K draws on the compositional logic of traditional East Asian landscape painting, reinterpreting it with contemporary imagery—food, domestic items, and his recurring “mini-me” figures. Through playful scale shifts and repeated forms, his works reflect on material desire and identity in modern life. In these layered landscapes, symbolism and satire quietly coalesce.

Songnyeo Lyoo constructs imaginative scenes set in seasonal environments such as gardens and beaches. Working in traditional ink and color on hanji paper, she populates her compositions with hybrid creatures, symbolic forms, and vivid palettes to conjure poetic, utopian landscapes. Her paintings balance fantastical content with formal clarity, offering immersive, lyrical worlds.

Each artist reconfigures the visual and emotional landscape of summer through a distinct lens, turning transient experiences into rich, layered compositions. Summer Splash is not merely a seasonal celebration, it is a reflection on how painting can preserve, expand, and transform the fleeting joys, memories, and fantasies that define our everyday lives.