Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Jayoung Hong was presented by solo exhibitions including 《Winter Sculpture with Warming Vegetables》 (Gallery2, Seoul, 2025) and 《Between Lying Columns》 (Ponetive Space, Paju, 2024).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Hong has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Correspondences》 (Shinhan Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《Firsthand Shop》 (CHAMBER, Seoul, 2024), 《Defragmentation》 (Mullae Art Space, Seoul, 2023), 《Peer to Peer》 (SPACE ON 洙, Seoul, 2022), 《The…Saver》 (Audio Visual Pavilion, Seoul, 2022), 《Kak》 (HITE Collection, Seoul, 2022), and 《Comma to Comma》 (Seoul Community Cultural Center Seogyo, Seoul, 2022).

Residencies (Selected)

In 2023, she was selected as a 7th-generation Open Studio artist at the Uijeongbu Art Library.

Originality & Identity

Jayoung Hong’s practice consistently begins with the exploration of the subjectivity and pleasure of “seeing.” Her early work 12 Mountains 9 Stones 6 Liters of Water(2020) recreated an artificially constructed landscape within the exhibition space, presenting a new perceptual field where nature and artifice, foreground and background intersect. The series Peepject: Two Holes for Eyes × 3(2018–2020) required specific physical gestures (bending the back or crouching the body), revealing the viewer as an active subject who reconstructs the world rather than a passive “spectator.” What Hong emphasized was not a singular landscape but a visual experience that emerged differently through limitation and transformation.

Since 2022, Hong has focused on East Asian landscape painting (sansuhwa) and the concept of wayu (臥遊, “wandering while lying down”), paying attention to how multiple viewpoints are integrated into a single scene. Works such as Fantastic Rocks(2022) and Beyond Landscape(2022) transpose the spirit of sansuhwa into sculptural and material form, allowing viewers to drift through new spatiotemporal dimensions as if traveling with their eyes. In particular, Beyond Landscape cut openings into a folding-screen structure, capturing both the inner painted landscape and the external scenery of the exhibition space simultaneously, thereby emphasizing multiple perspectives through the movement of the gaze.

The series Sansu Sculpture(2023) translated Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Mountains and Streams into three-dimensional form, imagining and reconstructing unseen backs, sides, and interior spaces. In this way, the artist pursued the act of filling in absent perspectives through imagination. At the same time, works such as Octagonal Rock Pedestal(2023) transplanted overlooked architectural ornaments into new landscapes, prompting viewers to reexamine elements that had been neglected within historical and cultural contexts.

In her recent solo exhibitions 《Winter Sculpture with Warming Vegetables》(Gallery2, 2025) and 《Between Lying Columns》(Ponetive Space, 2024), Hong reinterprets the relationship between nature and humans through the motifs of “garden” and “play.” In 《Winter Sculpture with Warming Vegetables》, the work Bonfire Dance Floor(2025) combined disparate elements such as flames, columns, and dolls to construct a dynamic landscape in which different viewpoints and movements collide and overlap. This development from her early “frame experiments” shows how Hong understands seeing not merely as a visual experience but as an event generated through the play and variation of perspectives.

Style & Contents

In her early works, Hong used industrial materials such as jesmonite, wood, and PVC to construct artificial landscapes. In 12 Mountains 9 Stones 6 Liters of Water, variable media such as water, grass, pipes, and pumps were combined to reveal sculpture as a structure that embodies flow and movement rather than a fixed object. The series Peepject: Two Holes for Eyes × 3 employed wood and resin structures to guide viewers to peer through apertures, integrating bodily engagement as part of the exhibition format.

She later employed fluid and unstable materials such as water, sand, and wax to merge visual perception with tactile experience. For instance, Wall Fountain(2022) and Buried Temple(2022) utilized flowing water and the textures of wax to endow static objects with temporality and movement. In these works, the properties of the materials themselves served as devices that transformed the meaning of sculpture, illuminating the interplay between matter and landscape.

Sansu Sculpture and Octagonal Rock Pedestal transposed sand—a fluid medium—into 3D-scanned and printed objects, combining the spirit of traditional landscape painting with digital technology. Through this process, Hong imagined and constructed unseen surfaces and contours, while incorporating water and mist to make the sculpture’s body unfold into constantly changing landscapes. The hybridity of natural elements, technology, and industrial materials became a key formal characteristic of this period.

From 2023 onward, she began producing structures with internal spaces, drawing on the concept of “architectural sculpture.” Statue of Goddess from Water combined seashells, stones, and cuttlebone to form a mountain-like goddess figure with an interior void. The ‘Layers Tunnel’(2024) series introduced tunnel-shaped structures that allowed viewers to simultaneously gaze into the interior and out toward external landscapes, offering a complex perceptual experience. Most recently, Bonfire Dance Floor integrated acrylic, cement, found objects, and even past works into a large-scale installation, transforming the exhibition space into a sculptural garden and opening up an experimental field where materiality and installation converge. In this way, Hong has expanded sculpture into a multi-layered site of media experimentation, moving fluidly between plane and volume, nature and artifice, interior and exterior.

Topography & Continuity

Jayoung Hong’s practice occupies a unique position in the experimental terrain of contemporary Korean sculpture, distinguished by her exploration of visual play and multi-layered perspectives. From her early ‘Peepject’ series, which foregrounded the dynamism of seeing through bodily engagement, to later works that draw on East Asian landscape traditions and ornamental elements, she has continually traversed visual systems between East and West.

Her works cross boundaries between two- and three-dimensionality, tradition and contemporaneity, artifice and nature, consistently transforming visual experience into a site of play. This can be read as an effort to recover duration and depth of vision within today’s visual environment, where everything is quickly seen and easily forgotten.

Over time, she has expanded her scale from small objects to large installations, gardens, and architectural sculptures, while consistently experimenting with fluid and material substances such as water, sand, wax, and ceramics.