Hong Sungchul’s solo exhibition will be held at Gallery IHN in Palpan-dong for 17 days, from September 5 to 21. Hong is an emerging artist who gained attention earlier this year at the 《ARCO Art Fair》 in Spain, where he introduced Korean new media art to a European audience. This exhibition presents his ongoing works, including LCD unit pieces utilizing solar cells and the ‘String’ works, in which photographic images are transferred onto elastic strings to construct three-dimensional bodily forms.
 
Hong Sungchul’s ‘String Hand’ captures parts or the entirety of the human body in photographs and prints them onto strings, transforming planar images into three-dimensional forms. By combining two or more images, the work creates an optical illusion that appears to move before the viewer. ‘Perceptual Mirror Blinker’ consists of finger-sized LCD units that repeatedly blink to generate abstract images. At once, it reveals a flow of vibrant energy while exploring the possibility of communication through organic and fluid visual imagery.
 
The artist draws out interactivity—one of the defining characteristics of new media art—through analog materials, and ‘String Hand’ exemplifies this approach. The overall structure of the work is composed of strings. Here, the string functions as a fundamental unit akin to a pixel that constitutes an image. Printing photographs onto regularly arranged strings forms a surface resembling a collection of pixels. These small units are arranged in front, back, left, and right, forming multiple layers.

Each layer bears an image of a hand, and depending on the viewer’s position, the gaps between the strings are either filled or emptied, producing a fluid visual field. In this way, the work generates continuous interaction depending on the angle from which it is viewed. Above all, the interactivity in his work is notable in that it reveals a will toward order within incompleteness, much like searching for form within a blurred image. Here, we encounter a symbolic contrast between instability and dynamism.
 
As a continuation of the ‘String Hand’ series, ‘Perceptual Mirror Blinker’ reconfigures so-called “dead pixels” commonly found in digital media—discarded defective pixels—into a flow of vital energy. The small LCD units are connected to solar cells and respond to light energy by continuously blinking. They move gently when it is dark and cloudy, and blink actively when it is bright. These irregularly moving LCD units collectively produce an organic abstract image. In this way, Hong Sungchul’s work transforms light energy into a visual image, and can be understood as an interaction with nature in that it incorporates natural energy. Furthermore, it proposes another dimension of relationship through which we engage with light.
 
In this way, Hong Sungchul’s exhibition approaches the limitations perceived in the digital world through highly ordinary and analog methods, while offering viewers an opportunity to experience new interactive works through diverse and unique media.

References

• 《Perceptual Mirror》