Under the Same Sky

Bringing together the works of Heekyoung Jeon (b.1981) and Hiva Alizadeh (1989), Under the Same Sky explores how experiences of nature and place are transformed through memory, emotion, and material. Rather than approaching landscape as something to be faithfully represented, both artists create spaces in which the external world becomes intertwined with personal and cultural experience.

Jeon’s paintings emerge from her encounters with the ocean and the forest. Sweeping gestures, pools of color, cascading marks, and passages of open space transform these landscapes into something closer to an emotional terrain. Water, vegetation, mist, and distant horizons seem to appear and dissolve within the paintings, shifting between recognition and abstraction. Her landscapes are therefore less depictions of particular places than records of what it feels like to encounter them—and of the sensations that remain afterward.

Alizadeh approaches place through material, memory, and cultural inheritance. His wall-based works are composed of long strands of synthetic hair arranged in dense fields of saturated color. At a distance, they can evoke abstract landscapes: horizons, waterfalls, vegetation, or atmospheric bands of color. Up close, their physicality becomes more pronounced, as individual strands gather into surfaces that recall the density and rhythm of woven textiles. The use of hair carries an association with the long tradition of carpet making in Kerman, allowing material and color to become carriers of cultural memory while remaining open to other, less explicit associations.

For Under The Same Sky, Alizadeh will also create a new work conceived especially for the exhibition. Expanding his fiber work from the wall into architectural space, the piece will take the form of an arch through which visitors can walk. The work shifts from something encountered visually to something experienced bodily: viewers pass beneath its suspended field of color and material, briefly entering the work rather than standing before it. The arch introduces another understanding of landscape—not as an image, but as a space one can inhabit and move through.

Coming from distinct geographies and cultural backgrounds, Jeon and Alizadeh offer different ways of experiencing and remembering places. Yet their works converge through color, movement, material, and the transformation of landscape into something internal and subjective. Under the Same Sky brings these individual experiences into a shared space, where distant landscapes, memories, and cultural histories can exist alongside one another. The newly commissioned arch makes this idea physical, inviting visitors to pass beneath the work and momentarily inhabit that shared space themselves.