smoke the moon presents Somewhere Here: new paintings by Hye-Shin Chun (Los Angeles, CA). Somewhere Here marks the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. Chun’s oil paintings on linen emerge in the hazy state between waking and dreaming. The artist’s daily scenes and objects are rendered onto wild visual planes. The proximate gaze in Chun’s work is an ever-changing arena of poignant observation and brushy rendering. 

Inside the labors of the everyday there are small miracles. A door, a woman driving, flowers flattening out across a table: all these little tableaus collide to reframe the quieter moments of domesticity into their truer and more surreal tone. Chun is painting the people and things closest to her, and their pensive familiarity is palpable across her canvases. Her paintings emerge in brushy rapture, the eye shifting between abstraction and figuration with equal wonder. 

Somewhere Here presents a body of work that sees and reflects deeply. Pensive mauves, clouded blues and waxy marigold oranges create soft grids of feeling in Chun’s paintings. Colors drift away from easy categorization in her work, built up by the artist in gauzy layers of paint to defy a singularity. This methodical, tonal weaving of color is central to Chun’s work. 

A moment can quietly become the whole world. The emotion of color, texture and form shepherd Somewhere Here into a new, yet familiar horizon. Chun’s paintings are secret afternoons, blanketed in a solitary romance.