Joung Young-Ju

Joung Young-Ju was born in 1970 in Seoul, South Korea, and by her own account grew up drawing the buildings of her hillside neighborhood before she left to study abroad. She graduated in painting from Hongik University's College of Fine Arts in Seoul in 1994, then continued her studies in painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Versailles, France, completing that training in 1997. She lives and works in Seoul.

Her signature technique layers acrylic paint over crumpled and mounted hanji paper on canvas, a process she uses to build dense, textured renderings of daldongnae, the hillside shantytowns that have historically housed Seoul's working poor and that continue to be cleared for redevelopment. A widening exhibition history in Korea and abroad followed her studies, including a 2016 solo exhibition at Sun Gallery in Seoul, a 2020 exhibition at Albemarle Gallery in London, and a 2022 solo exhibition at Hakgojae Gallery in Seoul, one of Korea's leading contemporary art galleries. She now shows internationally with Almine Rech, including a first solo exhibition with the gallery in London in 2024 and a second solo exhibition in New York scheduled for March to April 2026.

No verbatim, attributable quotations from named critics writing in major outlets could be confirmed for this profile. The available coverage, from Korea.net's feature reporting, Korean business and culture press, and gallery texts from Almine Rech and Pontone Gallery, consistently frames her work around memory and disappearance: the hanji paper itself, torn, crumpled, and rebuilt into hillside forms, is treated as a material echo of neighborhoods being erased by urban redevelopment. Writers repeatedly connect her personal history, growing up in one of these communities before studying abroad, to the emotional register of the paintings, describing them as intimate rather than documentary records of a disappearing Seoul.

Joung Young-Ju's auction footprint is real but not yet documented against primary sale-catalogue records. Korean market press and art-fair sales reports cite several results: High Hills Village 815 at about KRW 76,000,000 through Seoul Auction on 22 June 2021, City-Disappearing Landscape 305 at about HKD 687,500 through Christie's Hong Kong on 27 May 2018, and Memories 927 at about USD 66,000, reported through her Korean gallery Hakgojae at Art Basel Hong Kong on 2 April 2026. None of these figures could be matched to a confirmed hammer price in a primary auction-house sale catalogue in the sources reviewed, so no single result is presented here as a verified all-time auction record. What is well documented is gallery-level demand: in March 2023, Hakgojae Gallery reported that its full presentation of her paintings at Art Basel Hong Kong sold out to international collectors, including buyers from the United States.

Joung Young-Ju's market sits earlier in its development than that of an artist with a long, cross-referenced auction history. Reported prices for individual works span Korean secondary-market press and art-fair sales figures, from about KRW 76,000,000 to about USD 66,000, but none of these could be verified against a primary auction-house sale catalogue, so they should be treated as approximate indicators rather than a settled record. No catalogue raisonne exists, and there is no public certificate-of-authenticity program, so provenance and verification should run through her current gallery, Almine Rech, and, for earlier Korean-market works, Hakgojae Gallery or Sun Gallery. Her sold-out 2023 Art Basel Hong Kong presentation and her expanding gallery program in London, Monaco, and New York are the clearer signals of demand at this stage, ahead of a fully mature auction record.