Beans Roll Anywhere: A Journey Through Jung Jungyeob’s World of Color and Travel
Exhibition at Stellar Gallery, Seoul | July 2025
At Stellar Gallery in Seoul, artist Jung Jungyeob brings us to journey across borders, memories, and time through her deeply personal exhibition Beans Roll Anywhere (콩은 어디든 굴러간다). Every frame is a window into a specific place—Uzbekistan, Laos, Death Valley, Prague—filtered through the artist’s own footsteps, pen, and paint.
What immediately draws attention are the meticulously illustrated sketchbooks, stacked like quiet companions from the road. Each one is hand-bound, overflowing with sketches, annotations, and reflections. These aren’t just souvenirs—they’re testaments to a life lived with eyes wide open and a pen always ready.
On the walls, Jung’s framed drawings appear spontaneous at first glance—quirky, playful, full of color and motion. But on closer look, the pages are anchored in geographical and emotional memory. A blue sea peeks behind Kafka-like silhouettes in Prague; a lone vehicle winds its way through the vastness of Death Valley; a camel quietly watches over historic towers in Uzbekistan. These drawings hold time still, letting us feel the temperature of light and shadow in each landscape.
Among Jung Jungyeob’s vivid works at Stellar Gallery, two paintings especially capture the viewer’s attention. One stretches across the canvas like a glowing red horizon beneath a sky melting into warm pinks and soft twilight blue. In contrast, another work places a dense bean island floating serenely in an endless sea of sky blue, with a gentle cloud drifting above. There’s a quiet humor and weight to this image — the groundedness of the beans and the freedom of the sky in delicate balance. These two paintings evoke both vastness and intimacy, making you pause and reflect.
Each bean is drawn by hand, a task requiring enormous patience and presence. The resulting texture is hypnotic: what looks like a sea of dots from afar reveals delicate detail and a quiet rhythm up close.
These aren’t just beans. They are meditations on sameness and difference, community and solitude, noise and silence. In some works, the beans form jewel-like necklaces against velvet backgrounds. A single dot breaks symmetry, nothing is random, yet everything feels organic.
Jung’s obsession with the bean motif is more than aesthetic. She paints with patience and restraint, rendering each seed-like form with care, often hundreds per canvas. The accumulation becomes a rhythm, a visual mantra. There’s a strange intimacy in standing before her work: a quiet realization that this repetitive labor speaks to something universal — persistence, survival, fertility, or the microscopic patterns that underlie all life.
This entire collection echoes her motto – Draw the journey, like a bean rolling. It’s a simple idea, yet incredibly poetic. The bean becomes a metaphor: humble, mobile, full of potential. Her work reminds us that the smallest moments—when witnessed and drawn with care—can contain entire worlds.
Whether it’s in journals or on canvas, Jung Jungyeob’s art is a gentle but persistent act of noticing. And in a time when we rush to document everything through a screen, her slow, observational approach feels like a balm.
There are many more captivating works by artist Jung Jungyeob on display at Stellar Gallery — each piece holding its own story, texture, and emotional depth that photos alone can’t fully capture. To truly feel the warmth, humor, and quiet brilliance of her art, you have to see them in person. Beyond her work, the gallery also houses an impressive collection of artworks from other talented artists around the world — making it a precious gem well worth the visit.
📍 Stellar Gallery
17 Bongeunsa-ro 49-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul (서울시 강남구 봉은사로 49길 17)
All images courtesy of Vily Magazine.
