At the tip of the hand
12.04.2025
SECONDRoom, Antwerp (BE)

© Sungyoon Ahn & SECONDRoom

Some things take shape at the tip of the hand.
The ink that bleeds from the tip of a brush, the colours that fill a nail tip, the conversations unfolding as the polish slowly dries.

The act of manicuring is more than mere decoration–it is a gesture woven with care and labour, intimacy and tension. at the tip of the hand is a space where different languages, histories, and bodies overlap through the medium of hands. Just as nail art and sagunja (the traditional Korean painting of Four Gentlemen) intersect, so too does the act of manicuring with women’s lives.

When I first encountered Chego’s work, I was drawn to her experimental process of layering images across Korean traditional painting, AI, and digital tools. I would describe this process as a kind of ‘hybrid painting’, where different visual languages do not merely coexist but engage in a dynamic exchange. Sometimes they clash, sometimes they blend seamlessly. On her canvas, images accumulate, dissolve into one another, and at some point, evolve into new forms whose origins are no longer discernible.

Observing her work, I am reminded of how an individual absorbs, resists, and transforms within a cultural landscape. As a Korean artist living in Europe, Chego inhabits the very essence of ‘merging’–not just as a technical process, but as a lived experience. It is an embodied negotiation of estrangement and assimilation that seeps into her painting.

I find myself returning to the recurring motifs in her work–self-portraits, fragmented faces, hands. They appear disjointed, yet rather than pushing against one another, they continuously connect and regenerate within the same space. The bodies she portrays are not mere representations; they are layered embodiments of experience and sensation, entities in flux, constantly shifting and reshaping.

Since returning to Korea, Chego has also become a licensed nail technician. Nail art has become an extension of her daily practice, bridging her artistic and physical labour. In Four Noble Hands (2024), one of her recent works, she brings together nail art and sagunja—a painting tradition that once symbolised the refined taste of Joseon-era male scholars. Here, she intervenes in traditional aesthetics, juxtaposing vivid nail tips with the restrained elegance of sagunja brushwork–an intrusion both playful and defiant.

This intervention expands further in Four Noble Hands with Jeonildangyugo (2024), a digital print juxtaposing 3D-rendered nail art with the poetry of Gang Jeonildang, a Joseon-era female poet. Denied the right to publish her work during her lifetime simply because she was a woman, Gang’s words were only recognised posthumously through her husband. By reclaiming the visual language of sagunja, once considered a masculine aesthetic, Chego revives a voice that had been erased.

My publication made alongside the exhibition explores the nail salon as a space of labour and social exchange. The act of two women holding hands, applying polish, and waiting for it to dry is more than a beauty ritual. It is a moment of care, but also a reflection of the social expectations placed upon ‘cultivated’ bodies and the invisible work behind them. Beneath a flawlessly coated nail, unseen bodies persist—serving, tending, remaining out of sight. For this research, I gathered fragments—internet memes, news articles, literary excerpts, historical paintings—piecing them together into a small collage. Through these disparate elements, I sought to trace the tensions and sensations embedded in everyday gestures.

The exhibition At the tip of the hand follows the traces left by these acts. It is another hybrid imprint of crossings, where past and present intermingle, where silence and voices overlap. The flowers blooming on nail tips carry the traces of erased voices, the imprint of care, and the quiet shimmer of untold stories waiting to be heard.

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