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ART FACTORY
2007.09
Unlike conventional landscape, and mountain-and-water painting, portraying contemplative beauty, nature in Kim Sung-nam’s painting is furious. Twigs and leaves entangle and fill the canvas. They mash and disperse through rough brushwork, losing original form. In a summer scene, depicting fresh verdure, dense foliage flows down like vegetable juice. In a winter scene, bare trees expose black skeletons. Even a deserted house in a tranquil scene trembles with concealed tension. Kim’s most recent work forefronts nature dramatically, but it is far from an exaggerated hymn of praise to nature, or some exquisite depiction of beautiful subject matter on fine canvas. In his work, nature retains primitive energy: Without the usual sense of peace and blessing, this energy traces through injured and moaning animals, plants, and endangered humans.
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GALLERY HYUNDAI Gangnam Space
2009.05
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Art Space Pool
2006.06
The invention of a telescope and a microscope has widened the limited vision system of people. These inventories, which were invented in the 17th century, introduced what people cannot see because of so small size and far distance to people’s vision. The enlargement of vision itself became the opportunity to widen the scope of people's recognition.
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Sungkok Art Museum
2009.03
Kwon's huge size photographs contain something that overwhelms viewers' gazes. The enlargement of the photo size retains several meanings. This act was initially attempted by the school of Dusseldorf for the purpose of differentiating their photographs from others, usually used for documentation or reporting. Thus, the enlargement of the format has become the first step to proclaim the attempt to use photographs in useless terms such for hanging them on a wall in gallery or museum space, departing from its conventional utility. A group of photographers in recent days, who claim to be artists, tend to enlarge their photos to a monumental size and Kwon's works also can seen as a part of these examples. The founders of this group, Bernard & Hilla Becher, displayed the vanishing structures of industrial society in a neutral sense using the strict techniques of documentary skills. However, they denied their works to be recognized as merely documents or visual records, but wanted them to be recognized as individual images out of sociological contexts, not as simply traces of history. They eliminated such fluctuating and sensuous elements like subjective emotions, periodical changes, the depth of an event, etc. and aimed for a firm composition in a somewhat strict and a cold sense, rather than subjective expression of the capture of scenes involving only temporary meaning. An image in this context attains objectivity as a new entity, not as a trace of something else. Therefore, Bernard & Hilla Becher and the following group of Dusseldorf have presented a strict and minute sense of artificiality as simulacra instead of contingency and eventuality. In this sense, the enlargement of the format also has the effect of transforming a photograph into an individual entity rather than a merely mimesis.
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SITE Santa Fe
2008.06
Soun Hong employs found imagery such as photographs, newspaper clippings, anonymous postcards, and scraps of advertisements taken from magazines and other publications as the basis for his paintings. His work addresses a variety of issues, ranging from the theoretical language of representation embedded in the histories of painting and photography, to notions of marginalization and the construction of cultural identity.
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SEO GALLERY
2007.05
"Sidescape," the main subject Hong, Soun is working on, is a theme derived from a philosophical and scientific proposition called "parts and the whole," which Hong has been interested in for the past 20 years. Hong came to France in 1985 and, since then, worked on the objects of human figures and installation and researched on humans and their surroundings. Since late in 1990, he explored the whole universe while investigating into parts of mysterious time &space which is invisible to humans through combining animals and insects with their images. Since 2000, he has tried out all of his experiences in paintings, which are a fundamental genre of visual art. Drawing pictures is the most basic and expressive method and an everlasting genre not only for artists but for all mankind. Paintings, which have led the history of art from the beginning to the end, is still attractive to artists.
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Posco art museum
2001.07
Sooyeon Hong portrays the internal world of phenomena with abstract images drifting in misty space. The obfuscated world, for her, is the world of fantasy in which everything is ambiguous. It is the place where she once encountered a threatening experience, and the world of dreams in which numerous allusions are melted; a gigantic power controlling the way of expositions of existence behind a phenomenon. Hong describes the abstruseness of the interior world that cannot be perceived by human intelligence.
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Total Museum of Contemporary Art
2009.05
There is one thing/color spreading over a certain frame. Another one is laid on top of it. Stacked up one after another, the pile becomes a dense composite layer. Sooyeon Hong’s work starts as she piles up countless paint films on a “bare empty canvas.” The pigment is not filtered or mediated. Due to the constant procedure of adding, the canvas, coincidently or inevitably, turns into opaque. Hong’s frame is, however, still lucid as if no matter how many times you pour the water, it is still clear. None the less, there are traces of time, labor and paint in that clarity. Then what makes one to say that the canvas is transparent when it has no choice but to be opaque? And what does it means to say a canvas is transparent or opaque?
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