Jaeran Won - Artistic Journey

Jaeran Won is a contemporary artist based in London and Seoul. Won’s pop surrealist art portrays the shifting social condition of women in the postmodern world. In her paintings a somewhat anonymous and imperfect female figure is seen going about a variety of daily life situations and emotional states.
Spare scenes, sometimes autobiographical, capture feelings of powerlessness and emptiness in respect to everyday life. A simplified code of common objects and situations often contrasts with a dark psychological undertone. Jaeran’s work experiments with conveying powerful emotional states through minimalistic surreal scenes.
In the early 2000s Won painted female prostitutes who, although living in a male dominated world, possessed certain powers to change men's lives. These paintings explored the similarities between the life of a prostitute and that of an average housewife. She deciphered the interrelationships between men’s sexual drive, female empowerment and madness, as a criticism of a male dominated society.
In the following years the subjects shifted towards intimate condition of women, and paintings started featuring dolls without thoughts controlled by a master. There is always a concern about control and domination and sympathy for the subdued. The central stylized, imperfect female figure could be anyone or anything, and lived in a virtual environment where she could be bought, controlled, or be disposed of. The 'Playing Doll' series describe a sort of 'online shop' where human bodies, as well as human thought, can be purchased as a commodity. Then the buyer is represented playing and making different combinations of human-organs, human-thoughts and so on.