Judy Chung '18 Opens Solo Exhibition 'Cafeteria' at Downtown Gallery RAINRAIN
Visual Arts alum Judy Chung '18 opened a solo exhibition of her paintings, Cafeteria, at the downtown gallery RAINRAIN on February 13, 2026. The series of brightly colored, digitally inflected paintings will display at RAINRAIN through March 14. It is Chung's debut solo exhibition with the gallery.
Cafeteria is a series of collisions between contradictory influences—internet slop and Renaissance paintings, the cultural displacement Chung experienced growing up between the US and South Korea, cute and grotesque, control and rupture. Spaghetti recurs as a symbol across Chung's paintings, "its ambiguity reflects what Chung describes as aporia: an object whose meaning cannot settle, oscillating between attraction and repulsion," said the gallery.
Cafeteria features a central, eponymous painting, Symbiosis (Cafeteria) (72 x 98 in, acrylic on canvas, 2025), which introduces narrative elements that unite Chung's themes. "In Chung’s quintessential palette of bright neon colors, we find our main character spewing (or perhaps inhaling) heaps of spaghetti noodles in a school lunchroom strewn with the bright yellow strands," Claire Kim said in an essay that accompanied the press release. "The velocity of the lead figure’s action seemingly creates a glitch—her limbs and head are multiplied and spread wide in an attempt to find balance as onlookers are caught mid-reaction." The baroque, neon splendor of Chung's style is grounded in the classical here, with theatrical gestures that reference Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus.
Kim incorporates Sarah Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion to decode the psychedelic schoolyard scene, the humming social forces that affect the subject and the viewer. "The very physicality of shame—how it works on and through bodies—means that shame also involves the de-forming and re-forming of bodily and social spaces, as bodies turn away from the others who witness the shame," Kim quoted from the book.
"In Cafeteria, Chung constructs a world that is at once playful and punishing. The paintings resist resolution, holding contradiction in suspension rather than offering release. What emerges is a portrait of subjectivity shaped through friction between desire and conformity, individuality and collectivity, where survival often depends on learning how to perform, adapt, and endure in plain sight," said the gallery.
Judy Chung (b. 1990) was born in Seoul, South Korea, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2018 and her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in 2013. Her work has been shown internationally in exhibitions including What do Angels Look Like? at RAINRAIN, NY (2023), Vicotriassecret at Helena Anrather, NY (2022), Figuring the Uncanny at Field Projects, NY (2021), Happy Hardcore at Miriam Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2020), and there’s something about PAINTING at Tatjana Pieters Gallery, Belgium (2019). She has contributed to publications including DATEAGLE ART, New American Paintings, and Elastic Magazine.