South Korean artist Taehyoung Maria Jeon approaches the familiar subject of houseplants with a rule-bound sense of play. I try to avoid playing it safe or going for the obvious. Instead, I look at plants from a different perspective and express them in my own way, she says of a fantastical suite of digital illustrations. Ironically, having rules is what gives me the freedom to experiment with plant shape.
Trained as a printmaker, Jeon still thinks in layers, building compositions piece by piece even as she works digitally. She reimagines the specimens cohabitating in her apartment, beginning with leaves and stems before letting the images slip into surreal territory. On these imagined life forms, purple veins pulse through flattened fronds, red outlines stake bold boundaries, and a smattering of stars drifts across the foliage. The vivid color palettes amplify a deliciously uncanny mood while maintaining the clarity of her structural approach.
Composing the Plant Series
Jeon titles the ongoing body of work Plant Series, tracing its origin to a constraint she set for herself. The project started as a personal challenge to fill a square canvas with plants, playing with shapes and composition to pack everything in as much as possible, she explains. As the series has grown, so has its vocabulary of forms and rhythms. As the series continues, the drawings evolve and the nuances shift, but at its heart, it is always about composition, balance, colour, and shapeand hopefully sending out positive vibes, too.
That balance of method and imagination is central to her process: disciplined layering drawn from printmaking, rendered with digital tools that let her recast domestic flora as otherworldly bodies. The results hover between botanical study and dreamscape, unified by a compositional rigor that keeps even the most fantastical passages grounded on the page.
Folium with Volume
Dozens of illustrations from Plant Series have been gathered in Folium, Jeons first monograph from Volume. The publisher functions like Kickstarter and asks readers to back the project before printing, and you can reserve your copy on Volumes website. More from the artist is available on Instagram.
Rooted in observation and propelled by constraint, Jeons plants flourish in a digital ecosystem of her own makingand invite viewers to linger among their luminous veins and starry skies.
