Jaeyeol Han

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

Jaeyeol Han is a Korean painter working between Seoul and Berlin. His paintings are populated by faces and bodies that seem close to recognition but never settle into a stable identity. Sharp lines cut through dragged and compressed fields of colour; limbs overlap, detach from their expected anatomy, or migrate between figures. A form that appears as an individual at one moment may become part of a larger bodily mass at the next. Working at this threshold of identification, Han considers how far the human figure can break down while continuing to register as a presence. Han’s experience in Haiti became a formative catalyst for his attention to the surface of images and the structures operating within them. Since then, he has been concerned less with the assumption that a photograph can fully convey a person or event than with what becomes visible and what disappears within it. For Han, the surface is not a shell concealing a final truth. It is a material site where an existing image can be dismantled and made to appear differently. Developed over approximately a decade, Passersby (2011–2021) centred on individual figures and what Han calls “faces without faces.” His ongoing series Bystanders (2019–present) extends these questions towards crowds, gatherings, witnessing bodies and entangled forms. This is not a simple progression from the individual to the collective. Across both series, a figure appears as a distinct person while also being formed and altered through its...

Artwork