Recent works by Young In Hong, a Korean-born artist currently based in the United Kingdom, adopt anthropological themes and pluralistic genre formats. In particular, around the time she was selected as one of the four finalists for the Korea Artist Prize, jointly organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and the SBS Foundation in 2019, she began working with the history of human labor and animal ecology as central themes.

Given the nature of these subjects, such works can secure their distinctive artistic quality only through a process that begins with objective facts, proceeds through humanities-based judgment, and culminates in the artist’s subjective interpretation and aesthetic realization grounded in research.

Young In Hong adheres to this creative process. Above all, she pursues completed works that not only contain rich layers of meaning but also reveal formal diversity and a synthesis of expressive modes. As a result, her art traverses genres—embroidered textiles, craft-based sculptural objects, performance, and sound art—layering media into a condensed field of meaning.

In particular, 《Five Acts & A Monologue》 (Art Sonje Center Space 2, May 9–July 20, 2025), her first solo museum exhibition in Korea, presented this constellation of elements within a single opportunity for engagement—an exhibition that also functioned as a performance. In short, it provided a site that moved beyond the static contemplation typical of exhibition spaces, inducing a complex sensory experience.

As the exhibition title suggests, the artist constructed a structure in which monumental tapestry installations, handcrafted sculptural objects, five performances staged over the course of the exhibition, and a five-channel sound and video installation interlock like pieces of a puzzle within the symbolic condition of “acts.”

What, then, does this physical exhibition structure contain? Embedded like bones within this sensory field is a theme that viewers may not immediately recognize—one shaped decisively by the artist’s intent. Across eras, there have been those whose very existence was ignored within Korea’s power structures, those who lived as the weak; those who were never considered in the narration of modern and contemporary Korean history and have reached the present without leaving behind even the smallest trace of record.

Among them, the historical contributions and labor of women are of critical importance. Even if not encompassing the entirety of what these individuals accomplished in their lives, Young In Hong seeks to place what she has researched and reinterpreted into the realm of art as marginalized realities of Korean modern history. At this point, let us briefly detour to another artistic example that offers food for thought.

The Tension—or Ensemble—Between Art and Fact

The father of Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, worked as a factory laborer in his youth, eventually managing to save enough to open a small grocery shop in a rural town to support his family. He worked tirelessly from morning to night running the shop with his wife, whom he had met and married at the factory. After her father passed away, Ernaux sought to write a novel with him as its protagonist.

She ultimately concluded that this was impossible. To remember those who lived lives “subjugated to material necessity,” she realized, one would have to write not something “artistic,” but something that captured “all the objective markers of a being.” At least for people like her parents—those who possessed little, lacked education, and spent their entire lives oppressed by physical labor and subsistence, those who were culturally unrefined and situated at the lower strata of social class structures—she believed that “the artistic” had to be avoided.

Thus, Ernaux transformed her father’s life into a work of writing that maintained a certain distance from aesthetic literary form, novelistic transformation, and rhetorical expression. This was the work she herself defined as an “autosociobiography,” published as La Place (1984), which went on to receive the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s four major literary awards. The Korean edition is titled A Man’s Place. Yet was it not precisely this non-fictional mode of writing that became the artistic work that brought Ernaux such recognition?

Through her writing, Ernaux’s father was illuminated not as someone who had merely succumbed to material necessity, but as a literary figure who had carved out his life within a jungle-like society. This invites a valid question. In fact, Ernaux herself provided the grounds for such critique by establishing a binary between “the artistic” in literature and “objective markers” in life, thereby limiting the scope of art on her own terms.

Nonetheless, the matter warrants a more precise examination. In short, as Ernaux anticipated, repeating the form of the novel would not have allowed her to remember and illuminate her laborer father’s life through writing. Instead, by devising her own artistic form—the social autobiography—and positioning her father’s humble yet irreplaceable secular life within it, she succeeded.

Returning to 《Five Acts & A Monologue》, the exhibition prompted me to reopen Ernaux’s book. Put simply, the theme of rendering the lives and labor of socially and historically marginalized individuals as art connects Hong’s recent works with Ernaux’s writing. This connection, in turn, gives rise to a series of critical questions.

How should art address individuals who remain invisible within dominant narratives, and who risk distortion through aestheticization within the norms of fine art? How should visual art convey the physicality and immediacy of their harsh lives and labor? Must art reject aesthetic form altogether and focus solely on message delivery in the name of ethical responsibility and political correctness? Or, more radically, should it refrain from producing formal artworks on such themes altogether, remaining instead within an ascetic and self-reflective mentality?

Yet, as in Ernaux’s literature, Hong’s art possesses a distinctive artistic form and aesthetic completeness that embraces reflective and conceptual content. As discussed earlier, Hong’s recent works achieve a powerful ensemble of thematic inquiry and sensory-perceptual, aesthetic form.

The Possibilities of the Work

Materially refined and rich in expressive modes, Young In Hong’s works function as vessels of visual beauty and diversity that contain critical reflections on history and society as their content. In 《Five Acts & A Monologue》, the past lives of women—largely absent from official records of Korean modern history and barely captured even in fragmented popular memory—are materialized as meticulously crafted objects that quietly request understanding from the world.

These are not didactic explanatory texts. Instead, hand-embroidered tapestries, willow sculptures produced in collaboration with artisans, and small objects woven from bulrush carry these minority narratives. They diverge from conventional sculpture and craft alike: too tactile and interactive to be traditional sculpture, yet lacking utilitarian function beyond conveying meaning, they occupy an alternative artistic register.

Rather, these works are empirically organized according to the artist’s conceptual intent, encompassing subject matter, modes of production, forms of expression, and methods of presentation. Within the exhibition, these empirical concerns are framed as installation art and, more importantly, transformed into new configurations through five instances of live improvisational performance staged over the exhibition’s duration.

The central work anchoring the exhibition is the large-scale tapestry Manual for Five Acts Performance – Outer Wall of the Circular Frame, in which text and imagery are embroidered onto hemp cloth. Composed of eight embroidered panels connected into a massive circular form measuring approximately forty meters in length, the work depicts—through restrained imagery and language—the unofficial achievements and labor of women uncovered by the artist within Korean modern history.

Among the figures represented are former gisaeng-turned-independence activists Hyeon Gye-ok and Jeong Cheol-seong; Kang Ju-ryong, a rubber factory worker suppressed by Japanese police after protesting unjust wage cuts during the colonial period while calling for “women’s liberation and labor liberation”; Bu Chun-hwa, a haenyeo who led anti-Japanese movements in Jeju; Shin Soon-ae, who documented the lives of garment workers in Cheonggyecheon during the 1970s; Lee So-sun, the mother of labor activist Jeon Tae-il; and Lee Chong-gak, who organized a women’s labor union at Dongil Textile and was assaulted with human waste while resisting unjust dismissal.

Broadly speaking, Hong focuses on women who lived through Korea’s colonial and industrialization periods. On closer examination, however, the works are densely filled with stories of sweat, blood, tears, unyielding spirit, and humiliated bodies—stories far too complex to be conveyed by naming alone. By explicitly delineating the violence and oppression enacted by historical powers, Hong embroiders the horrific yet astonishing acts of resistance into fabric as objective indicators of Korean history.

In its installation method and viewing experience, the tapestry bears a superficial resemblance to the late-nineteenth-century European Kaiserpanorama. Yet unlike the latter—which offered illusory enjoyment of stereoscopic images through lenses—Hong’s circular tapestry invites viewers to read, observe, and contemplate the traces of arduous labor embedded in the textile itself, akin to the products of garment workers.

Moreover, the interior face of the circular tapestry is embroidered with animal figures inspired by the Bangudae Petroglyphs of Daegok-ri and Cheonjeon-ri in Ulju County. Through this dual-sided imagery, Hong appears to guide viewers toward encounters that traverse time, space, and species. Within a male-centered worldview that treats men as the sole humans and constructs human superiority within anthropology, both “women” and “animals” have long existed as excluded others. Through her textile labor, Hong gestures toward the possibility that these figures might once again permeate our consciousness.



1 Annie Ernaux, La Place (A Man’s Place), trans. Shin Yujin, 1984Books, 2022, quotations pp. 18–19.
2 Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Kang Ju-ryong,” https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0079723
3 Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Dongil Textile Workers’ Struggle,” https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0078976

References

• [칼럼] 예술이 만드는 자리: 홍영인의 여성 노동 미술
  [Column] A Place Shaped by Art: Young In Hong’s Art of Women’s Labor