In many cases, artworks resemble the artist—sometimes even their hidden side. I come to reaffirm this obvious truth while juxtaposing Seong Joon Hong’s earlier works with those scheduled for his upcoming exhibition. After passing through a period marked by intense formal variation and conceptual exploration, the current landscape of his work—where small lingering regrets or idle thoughts once clinging to a corner of the mind seem to have been erased—appears clearer than ever. The solidity of the work, however, is conveyed with a sensation as light as air and as soft as a gentle breeze.

Like mille-feuille, the French pastry whose name means “a thousand layers,” the works are built layer by layer with care, yet as lightly as possible. Their weight remains on the surface only as thick as the paint embedded on the canvas, passing through someone’s gaze and settling beyond the retina into memory. I momentarily hold back the poverty of rhetoric that claims to contain the depth of time and the trajectory of action on a flat surface, and instead consider it differently. On the other hand, because such thin depth and limited area are the only conditions permitted to the artist, I too confront only the width and depth of the surface before my eyes, inferring the before and after of creation and aggressively imagining all that remains concealed.

Horizontal and vertical. Against the order of the exhibition space—where works are hung with beautiful intervals and heights—and the color palette unfolding against white walls, I take measure. Yet before hastily explaining the logic of the work, I find myself thinking about a certain intersection where the distance between artist and artwork overlaps with the artist’s emotional projection and intellectual confidence toward the work. I feel a sense of relief. I have just encountered a place where the unimpeded momentum of the work and positive emotion brush past one another. It becomes possible to say that the exhaustion of yesterday and today—perhaps mistaken as anxious striving for improvement—is in fact a creative driving force that radiates only from the tender distance between the work and the artist.

The initial distance between artwork and artist is inevitably too close, but every day and every moment, they repeatedly drift apart and return within a certain range. Within the diffraction of artistic time, this is a persistent journey of returning again and again to the original position, a phenomenon that may be common across many forms of artistic creation. In this sense, Seong Joon Hong’s intention to convey the warm presence and mysterious vitality emitted by the body of works in 《Enfolding the Air》 marks a point he has just reached—a sense of distance in which artist and work gaze at each other equally, and the very weight of creation shaped by constant diligence, wishing that it does not end up pressing down upon one’s own world.

It is often said that when the restless gaze chasing the world beyond the atelier subsides, the internal logic guiding one’s engagement with work becomes clear. This clarity becomes possible only in the everyday distance between canvas and artist, in the timing of leaping from one work to another or pausing, in the movement of the hand and fingers gripping the brush, and in the oscillation between yesterday’s work and today’s tasks.

Within a career spanning roughly ten years and encompassing what is effectively a sixth solo exhibition, what meaning and position does this exhibition seek to acquire? And with what degree of clarity has the artist approached his work and prepared the exhibition?

Reviewing conversations held in the studio and the artist’s records written during the preparation phase, one particularly striking statement is his candid remark that the current layer series “began from a desire to enjoy life more as a painter.”

At its core, Seong Joon Hong’s creative direction—long prepared through observation of the most basic painterly essence of “paint on canvas,” as well as the exhibition site composed of artworks, space, and viewers, and the intervention of these elements into the work—has unfolded at his own independent pace and rhythm, rather than tracking the tastes and trends of the times. Through series that took the act of viewing exhibitions itself as a critical subject, and treated the scene of representation as a concrete object, he articulated layered structures of “exhibitions within exhibitions” and “works within works.” In doing so, he demonstrated an intelligence that allows multilayered perspectives surrounding artworks to mutually penetrate both inside and outside of painting.

This exploration of changing media conditions alongside unchanging ambivalent properties also extended into another series, in which digital photographic images—serving as preliminary data for painting—were actively juxtaposed on flat surfaces. Since 2020, the emphasis on illusion related to painterly layers and depth on the plane marks a stylistic departure from earlier works.

The results—reproducing planes upon planes, or emphasizing boundaries between them through muted shadows—may leave room for viewers with little time to consider the work’s trajectory to reduce it to a facet of abstract experimentation. What must be discerned within is the artist’s own syntax: a kind of medium-specific humor enacted through the materiality and representational properties of the painting materials he engages with daily.

By mobilizing realistic techniques to continuously confuse binary oppositions—support and ground, inside and outside, seeing and being seen, digital and analog, painting and non-painting—Seong Joon Hong performs a genuinely painterly wit and an autobiographical account of the medium itself. From early works to the most recent, while modes and strategies of expression have shifted, underlying them is a sustained attitude of posing fundamental questions about painting and continually renewing self-definition. This is nothing other than a process of crossing visible conditions and invisible structures of painting, repeatedly drawing closer to and distancing from the work while orbiting the surface.

Named 《Enfolding the Air》, this exhibition is expected to become an artistic turning point in which the logic of work developed over recent years overlaps, and various formal experiments are richly systematized and reorganized. However, through the recent exhibition 《Flowing Layers》(PIPE Gallery, 2022), the painterly responses and critical commentary to the issues he set for himself were already established to some extent, and his capacity as a solo artist—demonstrated through diverse expressive techniques and their effective application within space—has been proven.

From this perspective, what deserves particular attention in this exhibition is not merely visual admiration for newly attempted materials and techniques, nor a media-technological approach to painting. Rather, as exhibitions accumulate, the increasingly polished narratives, design sensibilities, and craft-based execution of materials can at times obscure the specific relational aspects between artist and work. Having passed through a period of intensively designing multilayered structures both inside and outside the surface and opening new passages through them, I wish to focus instead on examining the artist’s perceptual register—formed through phenomenological experience of the work’s physical presence—as the artist’s body and the work actively interpenetrate.

As the word “layer,” which had served as a central keyword in recent years, disappears from the exhibition title, it feels as though the driving force of the exhibition has shifted from the artist as designer of layers to the work itself. Indeed, the layers constituting the work are no longer limited to the physical structure of the surface or the illusion of images rendered in paint, but expand into a kind of “field,” broadly infiltrating the frontal plane of the work, the surrounding space, and the body and mind of the viewer.

For those who must face an exhibition like a riddle, one possible strategy of thought may be as follows: to treat the exhibition as if it were a retrospective summoning the artist’s early works, gathering from all directions fragments of thought on how Seong Joon Hong’s doubts and convictions regarding his painting and the art of the world accumulated, scattered, detoured, intersected, and eventually transitioned into the present work.

Using the beautiful planes before one’s eyes as clues, one might examine the subtle wrinkles and dispersed, coagulated traces running through them, and attempt to return to a supple time before anything hardened into fixity. To view the exhibition with the attitude of restoring countless layers of creation oxidized in air and submerged in time resembles the work of a geologist retracing deep dynamics through the fractured surface of soil.

If one can associate today’s dazzling visual art with the somewhat austere rhetoric of “geology,” it may be because the scientific inquiry into the dynamics between material formation and strata allows us to project the intermittent perceptual shifts and dynamic research that have occurred throughout the long history of painting. In a capitalist society, artworks are categorized as commodities whose value is measured and exchanged in monetary terms.

Yet they are also fetish objects imprinted with the artist’s entire thought and corporeality, and enigmatic black boxes that reveal their interior only when the viewer’s aesthetic desire and curiosity are projected onto them. The dynamic principle by which accumulation flattens and removal deepens may not be suited solely to explaining geology. It may just as well describe the artist’s present condition, the hidden side of the work, and the energy of the exhibition itself.

References

• [비평] 홍성준 회화의 지질학: 쌓을수록 평평하고 덜어낼수록 깊어지는
  [Critique] The Geology of Seong Joon Hong’s Painting: The More It Accumulates, the Flatter It Becomes; the More It Is Removed, the Deeper It Grows