Im Sunny’s solo exhibition《STILL UNSTILL》reinterprets the anxieties, dualities, and uneasy beauty embedded deep within the human psyche through the language of contemporary vanitas still life.
 
The artist delicately captures the paradox of being “still yet unstill” within the quiet framework of still life, revealing through her painterly language the inner fractures and contradictions that humans often conceal and avoid confronting.
 
Since the early 2000s, Im Sunny has consistently explored the relationship between media imagery and identity. In her early work Hello, I’m Sunhee (2003), she replicated her own image within popular cultural icons drawn from film, news, and television drama, thereby examining the idea of a “self defined by images.”
 
In Wonder_self (2004) and Wonder_people (2006), she analyzed the coding of emotions and identities constructed by mass media, critically illuminating the social formation of the self.
 
Her interest gradually shifted from the “otherized self” to an inquiry into painting as a medium. In her 2015 solo exhibition《The Flat》(Incheon Art Platform), Im began reexamining the essence of painting through questions of “flatness” and “color.”

Engaging with post-Cézanne debates on pictorial autonomy, Matisse’s chromatic flatness, and Richter’s material and mediatic experiments, she translated these Western art-historical discourses into her own visual language—balancing structural precision with emotional resonance.
 
In The Medium: Layered, Lined (2019), she further developed her exploration of color, brushwork, layering, and line, experimenting with what she calls “painting about painting.” These works capture the moment where construction and deconstruction of the pictorial plane intersect, presenting painting as both a structural composition and an emotive field.

Emerging from this sustained inquiry, ‘STILL UNSTILL’ marks a turning point where Im integrates her formal exploration with her personal and philosophical reflections.
 
Having experienced the social isolation and uncertainty of the post-pandemic era, the artist reconstructs the emotional amplitude of the human condition—where desire and anxiety, gravity and lightness, life and futility coexist in fragile tension.
 
While seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas still lifes symbolized death and transience, Im’s vanitas confronts the anxiety of being alive.

Fragile porcelain, wilting flowers, and decaying fruit—traditional emblems of impermanence—are infused with a vivid sense of life through light and texture. The resulting paradox—the coexistence of beauty and fragility—reveals both the artist’s lucid vision of the world and the profound empathy that underlies it.

At the conceptual core of the exhibition lies Milan Kundera’s notion of “Kitsch” from 『The Unbearable Lightness of Being』.
 
As Kundera defined, “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit”—a refusal to confront the unpleasant or imperfect aspects of existence. Im adopts this concept to critique the modern tendency to erase uncomfortable truths and consume only the visually seductive and emotionally superficial.
 
The “filtered reality” produced by social media and contemporary self-consciousness becomes, for the artist, a mirror of this contemporary Kitsch.
 
Im’s still lifes respond to this “age of deleted truth” as a painterly act of resistance. Her works quietly affirm that art retains the power to face complex emotions and uncomfortable realities.
 
In her representative work〈Still Unstill〉, porcelain symbolizes human fragility, flowers signify fleeting beauty, and fruit embodies both abundance and decay. As these elements coexist within a single composition, human contradiction transforms into aesthetic balance. Beneath the apparent stillness lies a pulse, and beneath the serene surface flows the living rhythm of unease.
 
Ultimately,《STILL UNSTILL》asks how art can bear witness to existence in an age of anxiety and obsession. Through still objects that paradoxically move, the artist exposes the instability beneath perfection and the fissures within the illusion of completeness.

On the boundary where calm meets tension, and beauty meets emptiness, Im Sunny’s painting reveals that “We are still trembling within stillness—and that trembling itself is the most human proof of being alive.”

Im Sunny majored in Western Painting at Ewha Womans University, where she also earned her M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking and later completed her Ph.D. in Fine Arts.
 
Through her experimental approach that bridges painting and media, she has explored the inner world and existential conditions of human beings in contemporary society.
 
To date, she has held fourteen solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions at major institutions, including the Seoul Museum of Art, Ulsan Museum of Art, Arko Art Center, and Ilmin Museum of Art.

She was also selected for major competitions such as the Korean Contemporary Printmaking Competition and the SongEun Art Award Exhibition, and has served as an artist-in-residence at the National Art Studio (Changdong Residency) and the Incheon Art Platform.
 
Currently, she continues her artistic practice between Seoul and Incheon.
 


Exhibition Information

Artist: Im Sunny
Title:《STILL UNSTILL》
Venue: Buyun (8 Gaehang-ro 106beon-gil, Jung-gu, Incheon)
Dates: November 3 (Mon) – November 15 (Sat)
Instagram: @buyeon.site / @joahee