Michelle Jung’s paintings explore the space between realism and abstraction, using floral imagery to examine how we experience nature in an increasingly digital world.

Drawing on both direct observation and contemporary visual culture, she creates works that feel at once familiar and transformed, inviting viewers to consider how technology influences perception, memory, and our relationship with the natural environment.

Built from layered brushstrokes, translucent glazing, and multiple canvases joined into a single image, Jung’s paintings shift with changes in light and viewpoint. Up close, surfaces reveal intricate networks of paint that evoke both organic growth and digital information. From a distance, these marks resolve into luminous forms that hover between representation and abstraction. Seams between canvas panels subtly interrupt the image, creating visual rhythms that become more apparent as viewers move through the space. In this way, the act of looking becomes an active and participatory experience.

Jung’s work draws from a wide range of art historical traditions, combining Renaissance inspired techniques of light and glazing with a restrained palette influenced by twentieth-century color field painting. Her paintings often appear to change under gallery lighting, emphasizing the relationship between surface, perception, and physical movement.

At the heart of Jung’s practice is an ongoing inquiry into how contemporary technologies shape our understanding of authenticity, beauty, and the natural world. Rather than offering answers, her paintings create spaces for reflection on the blurred boundaries between organic reality and mediated experience. Themes of time, change, presence, and absence run throughout the work, reflecting both personal transitions and broader cultural shifts.

Born in Connecticut, Jung earned an MFA in Painting from the Academy of Art University and a BA in Art History from Colorado State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at museums such as the Autry Museum of the American West, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and the Santa Paula Art Museum.

In 2025, she was selected to exhibit at Saatchi Gallery in London as part of Flowers – Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture, a show alongside artists such as Alex Katz and Jeff Koons. In 2026, she is participating in the Venice Biennale with the European Cultural Center’s Personal Structures – Confluences, and will return to the Venice Biennale in 2028 with the European Cultural Center’s Personal Structures – Confluences as a solo presentation.

Jung currently lives and works in Nevada.