Han Ji Min: Time Alone | London

JD Malat Gallery is pleased to present Time Alone, the debut London solo exhibition by South Korean artist Han Ji Min (b. 1978, Jeollabuk-do). Featuring 17 oil paintings, the exhibition offers a deeply introspective portrait of solitude, routine, and emotional interiority.

Han is known for her quiet depictions of solitary figures, often shown from behind in sparse, domestic spaces. These works invite viewers into moments of stillness that feel both familiar and elusive. Working in muted palettes of grey, blue, and pink, Han’s visual language is defined by restraint and ambiguity. Her subjects are neither anonymous nor entirely knowable. They resist spectacle, revealing themselves through posture, gesture, and orientation. As Han notes, “backs don’t lie.” In turning her subjects away from the viewer, she removes performance and calls for stillness, both from the subject and the viewer.

Han’s work reflects a sensibility often associated with South Korean contemporary art: emotional ambiguity, pared-down form, and a focus on the quiet poetics of daily life. While artists such as Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo explored presence and materiality through minimalist abstraction, and Do Ho Suh or Kimsooja examined memory through large-scale installation and performance, Han turns to figuration as her site of inquiry. Her subjects are not symbolic but simply present. They sit, turn away, or pause in anonymous interiors. In their stillness, they echo a broader tradition of Korean aesthetics that favour atmosphere over statement. Her paintings do not offer resolution. They observe, and they wait.

Time Alone draws on Han’s lived experience of contemporary life in Seoul. It captures emotional weight not through narrative but through rhythm and restraint. Her compositions begin in quiet observation. Gestures that might otherwise be discarded, a shift in posture, a fleeting breath, become the anchors of each painting. The artist maintains a subtle distance, both from her subjects and from herself. As she observes others, she also observes her own unconscious behaviours, finding strangeness in the familiar. These works do not dramatise solitude. They attend to it, and to us, with quiet persistence.

Exhibited on the ground floor of the gallery, Time Alone acts as a visual retreat from the city’s relentless movement. Han invites the viewer to slow down, to observe gently, and to stay with what is unresolved.