I've seen Young-Sook Hong's paintings, which have
an explosive vitality and unrestrained energy in their primary hues
and powerful brushstrokes. She primarily works with oil paint and tempera,
but she occasionally uses sawdust to expose the canvas as a relief state,
or she pushes the shape off the screen in the style of objet art, extending
the canvas as a single object. The screen is unlike the Western idea
of abstraction, which examines the formative essence of objects or composes
the screen with the artist's own symbolic form, despite the fact that
it does not show a precise shape. Because the two approaches of Western
abstraction are based on concrete objects, this is the case. Her art
is more accurately described as an expression of non-objective feelings
experienced in everyday life. It is, however, distinct from Surrealism's
automatic technique for revealing the unconscious reality.
Marcel Duchamp rejected the Western art tradition that relied on the retina. He asserted, “Once again, I want to pursue art that has served the spirit.” As a result, I recall him not emphasizing Picasso or Braque's Cubism, entrusting Courbet with the biggest responsibility for retinal art, and criticizing the nuance of realistic emotion demonstrated in <L'Origine du monde>.
Young-Sook Hong is a highly distinct and established artist, despite not being a well-known artist in the art world. She began her education a college in a Korean and completed it in a foreign country. She returned to Korea and spent a long time immersed in her own art universe, with no exhibitions. I've had multiple opportunities to see her recent small-scale exhibitions, and I can attest to the fact that she exudes an irrepressible intensity. She learned the formative practice of painting from Choi Wook-Kyung while developed a critical perspective about the social circumstances at the time she left to study overseas. She also received training in an environment outside of typical Western art traditions while studying in the United States. For a time, the energy of rage over reality's absurdity and contradiction was released excessively through her work. Her energy has just been polished into a healthy life energy as well as life energy. She sings about the strength of love and life, despite the fact that her concept is taken from ordinary life. Her paintings make effective use of the sharp contrast of primary colors with red and blue as primary colors, flowing line motions, and occasionally fast rotations of strokes. This exhibition features her most recent paintings, which clearly demonstrate these traits.
The titles of this exhibition,
such as <Before It Gets Hot...>, <Reverse Taegeuk>, and
<Song of Love>, seem to metaphorically represent her viewpoint
on social reality's paradoxes. It is an inner cry that observes via
the providence of the world or history, or interprets the situation
with humour, rather than a cry of violent struggle or revolution. Taegeuk
is an invisible presence that spreads throughout the macroscopic and
microscopic world, and it is the principle of the universe in which
Yin and Yang alter eternally. The inverted Taegeuk, on the other hand,
leads us to believe that there are many ambiguous circumstances.
A title with the Chinese idiom <???? (????)> means to prevent
mice from seeing the picture. I'm not sure if it's the fact that she's
driving mice out of her studio, but the setting leads us to believe
that her underlying aim is not to exhibit the painting to anyone who
don't sympathize with her. Furthermore, this circumstance is a metaphor
for the art world's response to institutional and capitalist cultural
forces, or the art world as a pictorial reaction.
Her paintings, as well as the analogies they represent, are intriguing
and significant.
What interests me more is that
via her work, she is developing more independence and working to serve
the spirit. Farmers in orchards understand that they can only gather
fruit when it blooms, but they promise that "the flowers will come."
We know that flowers do not blossom on their own; they require an atmosphere
in order to bloom. I anticipate her subjects to receive flowers as well.