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.

 

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 in 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 YutaoCaochangdi Art District, 2022.