Sejin Hong (b. 1992) begins her work by examining how perception is newly constructed through technology and the environment within her own experiences. Having lost her hearing as a child and lived with a cochlear implant as a prosthetic device, she has continued to create paintings that fill the gaps of missing information between the real world and herself with new sculptures or forms.

Sejin Hong states, “I have experienced that perception is not something naturally given, but rather a process that is constantly transformed through technology and the environment.” Her paintings explore the structures of perception that do not fully merge but instead slip, overlap, and diverge, through geometric elements and images of concrete space and plane. 

Her paintings feature images reminiscent of mechanical parts or industrial landscapes found in factories. These stem from her experience of perceiving the sounds of the world through a cochlear implant, a mechanical device, and function as a visual device that reveals the disconnections, distortions, and delays of perception as it passes through technological apparatuses.

At the same time, natural subjects are layered among these artificial landscapes and elements. The artist notes, “Through the visual montage of artifacts—such as spaces and objects within the work—and natural forms—such as cells, lines, shapes, and plants—I sought to reveal a punctum that diverges from the wholeness of sensory experience.”  

She explains that, in doing so, she aimed to contemplate “what it means for familiar yet unfamiliar landscapes to ‘interact’ with one another,” while also exploring “the points of utterance offered by the non-verbal.”

For instance, in her first solo exhibition 《A clear noise》 (Shinhan Gallery, 2019), Sejin Hong presented paintings in which she unraveled and reassembled objects and places around her—not through a single sense, but by tracing them with multiple sensory organs—until they became wholly her own on the canvas. 

At the time, her paintings dealt with the gap and interaction between the indistinct sounds of the world, perceived through a cochlear implant and hearing aid surgically embedded in her body, and the intuitively sensed world of vision. Though they may at first resemble ordinary landscapes, the non-representational elements within them invite viewers to imagine those points in sensory experience that resist reduction into the language of representation.

Looking at the recurring objects in her paintings, one often finds rotating devices such as electric fans or water tanks, as well as the forms of stadiums or grid-patterned floors. These everyday mechanical apparatuses fall silent and come to a halt when no electricity flows through them or when the tank runs dry. For the artist, they evoke the sensation of suspended hearing during the moments when she replaces the batteries in her hearing aid. 

Meanwhile, the lines on playgrounds or stadium floors indicate social rules. Since the moment in her childhood when she first came to understand the signals of traffic lights and crosswalks—signs of prohibition and permission—lines have functioned for her as symbols that impose order on the confusing and dangerous world of objects, offering the unstable subject a fleeting sense of stability.

The installation Tip of the Needle (2019), presented alongside the paintings, was created by imagining the interior of a 3D printer used to produce prosthetic hearing devices. The artist visualized this unseen interior and reconstructed it using everyday objects. At the center of the work lay an unfinished white “something.” 

Together with this yet-to-be-revealed object, the space of the installation exposes the opacity and insufficiency inherent in all forms of language.

In her 2021 solo exhibition 《Hidden Languages》 at the OCI Museum of Art, the artist more actively presented unfamiliar landscapes filled with geometric and dynamic forms, abstract spaces, overlapping fragments, and disjointed objects. 

Her paintings intertwine objects discovered in the ironworks and surrounding scenery of Euljiro with shapes born from her imagination. Within the canvas, straight and curved lines, smooth and artificial color fields, and geometric forms coexist without ever consolidating into a single image, generating fissures of unfamiliar sensation.

The ironworks of Euljiro, which became the backdrop of her work, resonated with the artist as something akin to the way she perceives the world. According to her, the sounds she hears through her hearing devices do not come across as natural but rather as something artificial. In other words, this auditory experience has attuned her to the cold, rigid textures and images that recur in her work.

The unfamiliar combinations and configurations created by the heterogeneous elements in her paintings also resemble the artist’s own auditory environment. Having used hearing aids for more than two decades, she explains that each time she switched to a newly developed device, her auditory environment was updated, allowing her to acquire new sounds. Experiencing firsthand the advances in hearing-aid technology over the years, she came to realize that “sound has many channels.” 

For the artist, whose ears have been altered and extended through prosthetic devices, sound has been perceived as information and material that can be individually separated and manipulated. If one considers sound as a channel, and the environment not only in terms of sound but as a multi-channel landscape of various senses, the complex—and at times seemingly illogical—compositional logic of Hong’s canvases can be understood.

The artist arranges photographs she has taken alongside images cut from magazines or printed materials, layering or cropping them to compose her canvases. As a result, familiar objects are combined in unfamiliar ways: a leafy tree is planted inside a building propped up by a water tank, or a television sits on an interior floor leaning against steel beams, creating a strange and unexpected visual environment. 

Upon closer inspection, a variety of textures emerge through techniques such as transparent layering, dripping, overlaying, and scraping of paint. The artist captures not only the forms but also the separation and harmonization of different “channels” of materiality, exploring a visual language capable of expressing the cold and unfamiliar sensations she has experienced.

In the series ‘Landscape of Shapes’ presented in the exhibition, the artist intentionally omits the distinctive characteristics of objects, rendering them as simplified, abstracted shapes such as geometric forms. While using hearing aids and a cochlear implant, she had previously used painting to bridge the gap between sensory information entering her body and the actual sounds of the world. However, as auditory assistive technology advanced and blurred this once-clear distance, she began to reconsider what she depicted. 

Accordingly, Sejin Hong came to see the space between the two types of information not as empty, but as folded—a kind of wrinkle—filled with lost or omitted language. She then began to capture these very “languages” and represent them visually as geometric shapes or simple lines.

In her recent work, Sejin Hong emphasizes a more planar aspect. For example, in her 2023 solo exhibition 《Swaying Straight Line》 at SeMA Storage, she presented paintings in which heterogeneous landscapes—composed of organic forms from nature and artificial mechanical objects found in factories—are transformed into geometric shapes, with added textural techniques that highlight their flatness.

In these recent works, Hong reconstructs the canvas by collaging images and manipulating the relaxation and tension of visual attention, aiming to further emphasize flatness and produce incidental outcomes through spontaneity. Additionally, in the artist’s recent paintings, scraping techniques stand out, which can be interpreted as a process of visualizing the diversity of individual sounds in a more detailed manner.

In this way, Sejin Hong’s paintings imagine the “empty spaces” of sensation—its momentariness, uncertainty, and susceptibility to error—and reveal the hidden languages within them. In the misalignments and gaps of such sensations, she seeks “the existence of language that is visible even without being spoken or heard,” and freely expresses it by applying color and reconstructing forms according to her own sensibilities. 

Her work, originating from her personal experiences, poses ontological questions to all who inhabit a constantly changing world, connecting sensation, perception, and existence.

 “I want to express the bodily language that perceives sensation, and the idea that it is not that I exist in the world, but that the world is revealed through my sensation.”   (Sejin Hong, Artist’s Note)

Sejin Hong graduated from the Department of Painting at Incheon Catholic University College of Fine Arts and earned her Master’s degree in Painting from Hongik University Graduate School, where she also completed her doctoral coursework. Her solo exhibitions include 《Crosspoint》 (Boan1942, Seoul, 2024), 《Swaying Straight Line》 (SeMA Storage, Seoul, 2023), 《Always Just Out of Reach》 (GalleryMEME, Seoul, 2022), and 《Hidden Languages》 (OCI Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Like a Poem She Never Wrote》 (CHOI&CHOI Gallery Cologne, Cologne, 2025), 《Prism》 (Sahng-up Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《Gestus》 (Daejeon Museum of Art, Daejeon, 2024), 《Turing Test》 (Seoul National University Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《Gravity Shower》 (N/A, Seoul, 2021), and 《MUMU》 (Platform-L, Seoul, 2019). 

Sejin Hong has completed residencies at major institutions such as the MMCA Residency Changdong and the Seoul Art Space Geumcheon. In 2025, she was selected as a semi-finalist for the ‘Kiaf HIGHLIGHTS’.

References

• 서울문화재단, 이달의 표지 작가 홍세진, 2020.03
• 키아프 서울(Kiaf SEOUL), Sejin Hong | 2025 Kiaf HIGHLIGHTS Semi-Finalists
• 신한갤러리, [전시 개요] 선명한 소란 (Shinhan Gallery, [Exhibition Overview] A clear noise)
• 퍼블릭아트, 천미림 - 찰나의 순간들을 붙잡는
• OCI 미술관, [서문] 숨은 언어들 (OCI Museum of Art, [Preface] Hidden Languages)
• 서울시립미술관, [전시 개요] 일렁이는 직선 (Seoul Museum of Art, [Exhibition Overview] Swaying Straight Line)