THE HARTZ PROJECT is pleased to present 歸樸：The 0 Degree of Looking, a solo exhibition by Korean artist Boyoung Jeong, on view from 19 September through 31 October 2026.
The world does not stop spinning, but here, it holds its breath. The exhibition introduces a quietude that realigns the gallery into a living architecture of stillness, filtering out the noise of modern acceleration to reveal the zero degree of looking. Borrowing from Roland Barthes’ concept of neutrality, it proposes a gaze stripped of narrative weight, cultural noise, and emotional projection. In this space, looking ceases to be a passive consumption of images and becomes a pure, unmediated awareness of presence.
Jeong’s work operates through quiet containment. Rather than asserting themselves, the pieces quietly establish a presence, registering a weight within the empty space through an exquisite interplay of light, shadow, and minimalist geometry. By reducing the visual field to its absolute essentials—the slow drift of light, the gravity of a shadow, the quiet friction of texture—the work resets the eye. These are not voids, but pregnant silences—moments where the air settles, memory lingers, and the boundaries between the inner self and the external world begin to blur.
Jeong’s creative process is an act of prolonged meditation, where every repetitive gesture, subtle texture, and layered tone becomes a physical record of time slowing down. She treats light not merely as an element that illuminates an object, but as a dynamic, moving presence that reveals the hidden textures of daily life. In these quiet intervals, a subtle resonance emerges not from the spectacular, but from the transitional—the shift of dusk into evening, the soft curve of an interior shadow, and the profound peace found when we simply allow ourselves to exist in the stillness.
