'The Silent Stare Between Us' (2026) draws on Kim’s childhood memories of encountering cows in the Korean countryside. Their immense, quiet presence evoked both unease and calm, leaving an impression that remains difficult to comprehend. In the painting, the cow appears alongside familiar tile patterns and a small red dinosaur. While the dinosaur is known only through images and imagination, the cow, despite belonging to lived experience, remains equally mysterious. A red painted frame becomes part of the image itself, unsettling the boundary between the painting and its surrounding space. Bringing together fragments of memory, imagination and everyday life, Kim creates a space where the familiar becomes strange and the unknown feels unexpectedly intimate.

Seungyeon Kim is a London-based painter who received her BFA in Fine Art (Painting) from Kookmin University, Seoul, and her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2026. Her practice draws on fragments of childhood memory and sensations that remain vivid yet difficult to fully recover. Working intuitively, she layers, distorts, and rearranges images from different times and places, allowing traces of their origins to remain as new relationships emerge. Her paintings bring personal memories and shared imagery into the same space, where familiarity and strangeness, past and present, coexist without resolving into a single narrative.