Jeehye Song b. 1991, Seoul, South Korea Works and lives in Düsseldorf, Germany
Jeehye Song studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Meisterschülerin of Andreas Schulze) and is the 2025 laureate of the Kunstpreis junger westen, currently presented with a floor-spanning solo display at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (21 Sep – 16 Nov 2025).
Die Hoffnung fliegt weg (the hope flies away)
2023
Acrylic and oil on linen
130 x 160 cm
51 x 35 cm
45 x 35 cm (set of 3)
Song constructs images that hold appearance and retreat in the same frame. Figures and objects gather into a quiet suspension; surfaces record hesitation, revision, and minute shifts of rhythm. Her compositions are precise yet porous, allowing images to form and un-form in real time so the viewer senses the work thinking through itself. Crucially, this clarity of construction does not cancel lived feeling—it channels it. Song’s pictures make palpable a set of ambivalences nearly everyone recognizes: the wish to be alone and to be together; to love and to resent; to feel happiness shot through with loneliness and low, ongoing anxiety. Nothing is dramatized; the contradictions are built into light, spacing, and tempo so the recognition arrives directly, without explanation. This is painting that reflects on its own means—where decisions, doubts, and erasures remain visible—while staying anchored in the medium’s tradition of composing attention. The result is neither confessional nor cool: it is a lucid image-making that treats feeling as a structural condition of looking.