Land on me softly

We yearn for our lost continuity.

(Georges Bataille)

As it continues to expand its programming beyond its existing locations, HdM Gallery is pleased to present land on me softly, a solo exhibition by Yeonsu Ju.

Presenting ten new works from her Lisbon studio, the exhibition explores memory, longing, and the unstable relationship between presence and absence. The series culminates a year of development for Yeonsu Ju, following a successful residency at ‘The Cabin’ in Los Angeles.

Born in the southern countryside of Korea, Ju creates paintings that function as sites of invocation—spaces where sensation, memory, and emotion emerge and dissolve in continuous cycles. Her figures resist fixed identities and conventional portraiture, appearing instead as fleeting presences suspended between recognition and disappearance.

Working primarily in oil on raw linen, Ju primes only the reverse side of the canvas, allowing the exposed weave and absorbent surface to remain visible. Pigment settles unevenly into the fabric, creating images that feel both immediate and elusive. Without preliminary drawings or predetermined compositions, her paintings develop intuitively through the act of painting itself. Faces, gestures, and chromatic relationships emerge gradually, as though summoned rather than constructed.

Quiet references to Korean ancestral rituals run throughout the work. Circles traced in air, repeated gestures, and offerings made before absence evoke ceremonial practices that seek connection between the living and the dead. In certain memorial traditions, the dead are not remembered as distant figures but as undead presences—temporarily invited back among the living, occupying a space that is neither fully absent nor fully present. Ju's paintings inhabit this threshold, where visibility and invisibility, memory and forgetting, continuously overlap.

Central to the exhibition is an exploration of memory not as a fixed archive but as a living process. Drawing upon ideas of duration and becoming, the works suggest that memory is constantly reshaped through perception, emotion, and time. Recent paintings introduce diagrammatic elements—circles, directional markings, and fragmented spatial structures—that function as emotional cartographies rather than explanatory systems. These recurring forms trace the movement of thought, grief, intimacy, and desire as they loop, dissolve, and return.

The body remains an important yet unstable presence throughout the exhibition. Faces fragment, expressions shift, and multiple emotional states coexist within a single image. Rather than depicting singular subjects, Ju's paintings reveal how images persist within us, accumulating emotional residue long after their original moment has passed.

Colour moves instinctively across the surface in saturated reds, bruised blues, luminous yellows, and dense shadows. The paintings possess a simultaneous intimacy and intensity, drawing viewers into atmospheres charged with vulnerability, remembrance, and unresolved longing.

In land on me softly, painting becomes a vessel for what resists permanence. Through gestures of appearance and disappearance, Ju creates spaces where memory returns in fragments, where the invisible briefly takes form, and where images continue to circulate long after they have vanished.