Juliana Paek: Tears of Things

Against the backdrop of her German-Korean identity Juliana Paek’s interdisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of painting, installation, sculpture, and digitally mediated fabrication, engaging questions of subjectivity, inheritance, and relational ontology through materially layered compositions. Paek’s work examines the construction of identity as a process conditioned by intergenerational memory, cultural displacement, and systems of symbolic transmission. Through the integration of figurative painting, diagrammatic structures, and fabricated sculptural forms, Paek constructs environments in which the psychological and the architectural become mutually constitutive. Through this layered visual language, Paek examines the tension between personal history and collective systems, addressing themes of cultural dissociation, vulnerability, and belonging.

Central to Paek’s practice is an investigation into the instability of subject formation. Her works frequently position the body within fragmented or networked spatial systems that evoke both genealogical mapping and technological infrastructures. In this regard, for Paek identity is not a coherent or autonomous entity, but a contingent formation produced through relational and historical entanglements. In conjunction with this, is the interplay between intimacy and distance, with paintings that frequently portray fragile, emotionally charged figures that appear suspended between exposure and concealment.

Within this context, the works constituting the current exhibition have been composed through the philosophical lens of lacrimae rerum, in which sorrow and fragility are understood as embedded within the fabric of existence itself. In this regard, Paek’s works are permeated by an atmosphere of suspended melancholia, where absence, fragmentation, and emotional residue emerge not as representational motifs alone, but as formal conditions. Thus, grief, functions less as narrative content than as an ontological structure embedded between bodies, objects, and memory.

Further theoretical thematic frameworks include a contemporary reinterpretation of the Great Chain of Being, where all forms of existence are interconnected within a larger metaphysical order. In this instance Paek’s work holds an emphasis on the interconnected systems of human, technological, ancestral, and symbolic relations. Her practice frequently deploys branching forms and recursive visual motifs that suggest a non-hierarchical model of relationality in which entities exist through conditions of mutual dependence. In this sense, by destabilizing the distinctions between organic and constructed forms, individual and collective memory, Paek foregrounds a conception of existence structured through material interrelation within which emotional, ancestral, and material realities remain inseparably linked.

Paek’s work ultimately resists fixed resolution, instead producing spaces of epistemological and emotional indeterminacy. Through creating spaces in which vulnerability becomes structural — where emotional states are embedded into material form, and where fragmentation itself operates as a mode of relation, the resulting environments function as speculative sites in which vulnerability is neither individualized nor symbolic alone, but structurally embedded within broader networks of cultural and ontological relation.

Juliana Paek (b.1997, Düsseldorf) currently lives and works in Düsseldorf. Paek studied Philosophy and Art History at Heinrich Heine University and graduates from Düsseldorf Art Academy having studied under Prof. Yesim Akdeniz and Prof. Maximiliane Baumgartner and Prof. Nick Maussin 2026.

Previous exhibitions include: ‘Portraits - Let Man Be Noble’, curated by Dr. Barbara Hess, Braunsfelder, Cologne, 2025; ‘Somewhere… Everyday. The Politicization of the Everyday’, curated by the Bonn Exhibition Group, Women’s Museum Bonn, 2025; ‘Self Exit’ (solo), curated by Maren Knapp, Nexus Nails, Düsseldorf, 2025; ‘My Travel Diary’, Metalhouse Gallery, Gyeonggido, South Korea, 2024; ‘Fresh Positions’, BBK Forum Düsseldorf, 2024; ‘SILENC10’, curated by Nathalie Sofie Schulz, reinraum e.V., Düsseldorf, 2024; ‘A Light and a Heavy Body’, curated by Gao Yutao Caochangdi Art District, 2022.