Jane Red is a contemporary artist whose practice observes contemporary culture, the meanings embedded in religious systems, and the structures that shape collective life. her ongoing project, Contemporary Icons, develops a visual language of recurring symbols and archetypal figures to reflect on contemporary mythology.

her path to this work has been consistent. at twelve, she joined a local newspaper as a junior correspondent, beginning an early engagement with visual communication that would expand into photography, graphic design, and editorial layout. at eighteen, she moved to the Czech Republic where she studied the history of Christian art and visual communications. there she developed a professional interest in visual language, symbolism, and how image relates to meaning.

she began painting during the с19 pandemic while living in Turkey, initially working with abstraction and exploring colour, form, and perception. after returning to Russia, her interests in visual culture, sacred imagery, and contemporary image-making converged in a recurring figure: a human with a heart instead of a head. this became the central iconographic sign of Contemporary Icons, an ongoing inquiry into how people continue to create systems of belief, ritual, identity, and value as the objects around them change.

alongside her artistic practice, Jane has worked in art direction and visual communication and has curated exhibition projects. her background across different visual disciplines continues to inform her approach to composition and the construction of visual language.

in 2026, Jane relocated to Seoul, where she continues to develop Contemporary Icons through painting, drawing, and experimental image-making. at its centre is a question: what is an icon today, and who has the right to become one. in a moment when anyone can be followed, repeated, and treated as a symbol, her works remain entirely handmade, preserving brushwork, irregular edges, imperfect lines, and shifts in pressure. these traces are the evidence of natural intelligence at work, a record of human time, attention, and presence, set against the ease of the artificial.