Breath & Forest

Ha Kyehoon, art critic

Hong Sujung has been creating artwork of unique images constantly visualizing her sensitive emotion and thoughts as an artist and as a woman. So far, basically speaking, her artwork have shown human figures with no facial expressions but the continuous fine lines of flower petal shapes which seemed to be visualizing the human characters’ thoughts filled the canvases by expanding from the human figures’ heads or hands on the pastel tone background.

 

Sometimes her human figures’ faces are covered and expressing bold emotions, but most of times, they do not seem to be very descriptive as the figures are in standing-still positions. The human figures are either expressed in silhouettes or expressed by a couple of simple color shapes, their values and shades are not realistically expressed or they are positioned in an unexplainable surrealistic space. Because of these reasons, it is the fine line continuous flower petal shapes that create spaces in the artwork and that tell narratives.

 

Though the human figures are not described enough to understand the figures exactly, the objects on the canvases are assumable by the hints from the Hong Sujung’s artwork titles, and the artist’s unique way of expression -the expanding fine lines- visualizes expansions of consciousness and crossings between consciousness and unconsciousness. Regarding to this way of expression, the artist once said, “This is to try speaking to others”.

 

If you look closely at Hong Sujung’s representative character of her artwork, the fine lines, they make small petals or grains that are expanding by connecting to each other like chains, or they make voluminous shapes such as clouds or mushrooms that repeat distorted spirals. As the repeated lines create rhythm through their little thickness differences and subtle color changes, viewers can find that this is not a mechanical repetition but has detail variations. After all, this way of expression enriches the artist’s intended symbolic message of crossing consciousness and unconsciousness or connecting between existences or expanding thoughts and emotion, and communicates motives symbolically or surrealistically; it is the major way of expressing and the tool for subject communication for Hong Sujung’s artwork.

 

Hong Sujung’s artwork start from the artist’s thinking, and sometimes her thoughts come from the situation of the space where the artist stays. Some of the artwork use found images from her book readings, and some artwork use images that are created based on thinking clues from her traveling. Hong Sujung suggests two types of titles for such artwork. One of them is the word-type like a beginning of religious practices such as <At the End>, <Too Much Breathing>, <mememe>, etc., and the other is the sentence-type like a sentence from diaries or letters of the artist such as <Can’t Hide>, <Say Like That>, <Good Moments are Always Crucial>, etc.

 

The subject of this exhibition is ‘Breath & Forest’. In early 2014, Hong Sujung had Can Cerrat Residency near Barcelona, Spain, and she could experience being immersed in the forest which has opposite atmospheres from busy cities. Her artwork created by focusing to the energy of lives that are living quietly in the forest, damp ground, and the primitive land will be newly exhibited at this exhibition.

 

The artist brought the ambience of the residency site through her drawings and small size artwork, and she has created large size artwork such as <Welcome to CAN>, <Grove>, etc. with the Can Cerrat feel. The objects in the artwork that seem like new sprouts or that seem like quietly standing odd stones since the beginning of the world surround like annual rings for the repetitive bending lines which also appeared in Hong Sujung’s previous artwork.

 

Such artwork still has Hong Sujung’s previous line-descriptive style, but they are somewhat different from her previous artwork for their background expressions and object placements. Especially, <Dryad> shows the artist’s transition transferring from the previous executions to the current executions. Comparing to the previous executions, the current executions show stronger primitive colors that are replacing pastel tone colors, background details are more descriptive, the spatial depth is more emphasized, and such differences are letting the objects in her canvases be more specific and real. Now, the objects in the canvases seem to be settled better in the more realistic space and seem to be earning life and breathe. How Hong Sujung’s direction of emotion and message communication for her audience will move on through such changes could be a point of view when viewing the new artwork.