Artist Jeong Zikseong is a painter who extracts the characteristics of objects in the form of metonymy and synecdoche abstraction and visualizes them with strong color contrast and brushstrokes to express the will to live beyond the harshness and pain of life. The artist, who had always been interested in mother-of-pearl, learned the mother-of-pearl lacquerware technique at the recommendation of a mother-of-pearl master, and began the ‘Modern Mother-of-pearl Painting’ series to combine the craft, which is a separate field from art, into painting. Her unique painting form, the strong contrast between the brush strokes of the support, is directly connected to the formal characteristics of <Modern Mother-of-pearl Painting> through the contrast between the black surface of the lacquer and the shining physical properties of mother-of-pearl.

After graduating from Seoul National University’s Department of Painting and its graduate school, and completing a doctorate program, she gained fame for her paintings featuring various real-life places, such as residential areas of the working class and workers’ workplaces. After receiving the Excellence Award from the Gana Art New Artist Contest in 2006, she was selected as the ‘Young Artist of the Day’ by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in 2012 and the ‘Artist of the Day’ by the Kim Jong-young Art Museum, and in 2021, she was selected as the Artist of the Year at the Chong Kun Dang Arts Awards. Her works are held in various places, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, and Hyundai Motor Company.