Born in 1959 in Seoul, Korea
Lives and works in Seoul

Soun Hong
The Sidescape, 2008

There are two major characteristics in my works; first it deals with the motifs of work and the personal gaze that falls at a slant to the public. The title of my work The Sidescape, which is self-explanatory, emerged from the corners of certain imageries. The images came from news reports from the Internet. This imagery is exposed and shared with the general public, and becomes the public’s point of view without being questioned of its intention and objectivity.

This processed imagery from the media creates the framing device of the reporter’s intention to communicate the situation. Whether you want or not, the viewer is invited to a rather biased point of view. These countless imageries in the media, which mostly deal with calamity and entertainment, create conventional conception to the viewers.

One of my hopes in this work is to dismantle the imagery from what is portrayed in the public and approach it from a side angle. I believe art is a necessary and valuable social discourse, and I hope that my works will become an arbiter to offer a different gaze. Moreover, it would propose a different gaze to view the world, even if it sometimes creates inconveniences.

The other motive in my work is focused on the process of work, the practical part of creating my images. From the beginning, the birth of painting evolved from the effort to create an illusion, by trying to put three-dimensional substances into two-dimensional surfaces, aiming for the impossible. Therefore, there were enormous amounts of attempts — new inventions and experiments of ways of approaching art. Among those, the law of perspective from the Renaissance was one of the greatest inventions in our history, and it still deeply affects our conscience. However, this law of perspective carries many problems. One of these problems is that it is only possible to keep the law of perspective when you place yourself at the center, the center of the world so to speak. This leads to the issue of choosing who is the center and who is the perimeter, and the issue of the suppression begins to overlap in the same discourse.

I hope my work, The Sidescape, will revolve those suppressed areas. We need to let go of the conventional way of looking through the law of this perspective. It has been a challenging attempt for myself to create imagery without a perspective, and at the same time it offered a source of interest to me. There are things that are hard to draw and express through perspective drawing, such as clouds and smoke without a form. Thankfully, images from news media had smoke and it became a regular subject in my works. The issue of the gaze has been an ongoing investigation for me.

I believe the reason fine art has sustained from ancient time until now is, ironically, because it was a question posed with no right answer, and as said before, it was an attempt for the impossible. It offered many different responses and solutions, thus it left huge footprints in the spheres of art and culture. I hope my work The Sidescape will draw interest from the viewers, as well as offer answers.

Soun Hong’s installation of paintings is located in the triangular space between Galleries 5 and 6.

Before departing for Paris in 1985, Soun Myung Hong studied in the harbor city of Busan, South Korea – a place that would shape his conceptual approach towards artmaking throughout his career. The liberal, creative atmosphere and the intellectual community of this international port city encouraged Hong to pursue a life-long philosophical investigation into the relationship between parts and the whole.

Despite Hong’s penchant early on for working in different media, which ranged from printmaking to installation art, the themes of the impermanence of beauty and artificiality remained consistent throughout his various projects. In his large-scale multimedia pieces, Hong often used insects, animals, and other natural elements that are as essential to human life as water, soil, and light. With these projects, such as Insectopia (1999), Hong attempted to explore spaces and places that seemed mysteriously invisible to us; however, the works ultimately drew attention to our own culturally conditioned myopia.

Recently, Hong has developed a series of paintings entitled Side-scape (2004-07) and Allegory Landscape (2004-07). His paintings of rocks, mountains, and seashores are based on found images culled from daily newspapers, magazines, and the internet. Painted in subdued hues with an adept hand, Hong presents his viewers with a collection of beautiful, serene landscapes.

Reconstructed from only small fragments of the original photographs, which depict the violence of war, tragic accidents, and acts of terrorism, the paintings create multiple effects on the viewer: we simultaneously experience revulsion and euphoria knowing that these beautifully painted images are simply edited, prettified visions of the insidiousness of human nature. Hong eschews the realism of his borrowed subject matter, and his deliberately loose painting style provides few pictorial details, which gives his audience the impression that the painting is unfinished. The ambiguity of the pictures, which are based on fragments, invites his viewers to then consider what the whole might be. For Hong, the painting of parts is the ironic connection to the whole that the artist views as the zeitgeist in politics, cultures, and environments.

Influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s theory on simulacra in mass media, Hong’s paintings function as an analysis of the schism that exists between reality and its representation. In Side-scape and Allegory Landscape, Hong tests his own assumption that viewers would mistakenly visualize only scenic impressions through his representation of landscapes, rather than projecting a more complete picture of the horrifying reality on which the images are based.

Hyunjin Shin