Installation view of 《Shade Left Behind》 © SONGEUN Art Cube

SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation presents Woojung Hoh’s solo exhibition 《Shade Left Behind》 from November 19 to December 21. Hoh is the first selected artist for the 2020–2021 SONGEUN Art Cube Exhibition Support Program.

SONGEUN Art Cube is a nonprofit exhibition space established to encourage the creative activities of emerging artists and support their exhibition practices. Since its opening in January 2002, it has selected artists every year through an open call, supporting solo exhibitions and future activities.

In this exhibition, Woojung Hoh presents 15 new works containing experimental attempts not previously seen in his practice. Moving beyond his previous works that reflected vast anxiety and void, he realizes multidimensional thought within flat paintings and builds a deepened artistic worldview.

Without damaging the thin lines drawn in pencil, the artist uses oil paint to present spaces of new geometric forms through his own distinctive working method. By drawing planned lines on a canvas coated with a layer of paint and carefully filling them in with paint of another color, he brings nonexistent planes to the surface.

Whereas previously he mostly rendered works in black and white, leaving only pencil lines on a black background and filling the remaining areas with white paint, in 《Shade Left Behind》 he adds primary colors, making the spaces of subject and background more sharply distinct and granting a kind of existence to the spaces he creates.

Upon entering the exhibition space, our gaze encounters a blue painting hanging on the wall. The moment we face the blue space of the canvas before us, we will first recognize the presence that draws our attention as the subject, and then perceive the white space that appears afterward as the background. The objects that finally come to possess existence, mentioned at the beginning, are given another meaning through the viewer’s gaze.

However, the artist does not greatly depart from his usual method of making. This time again, he first constructs the background in blue, leaves traces of pencil, and then highlights the space of the subject with white oil paint, overturning our common notion that “the white empty space is the background.”

Through these new works, the artist asks what the difference between background and subject is, and anticipates the interpretations of each individual viewer.


Installation view of 《Shade Left Behind》 © SONGEUN Art Cube

The different geometric forms within the spaces he creates are reborn as new objects through the viewers. In this respect, Woojung Hoh expresses his contemplation on “existence.” When viewed through ordinary perception, the geometric forms Hoh draws are naturally accepted as parts of some complete object.

Because they make us think that different single-layered forms are overlapped and concealing one another, our judgment that the overlapped objects possess a certain shape is merely a guess. If something can be visually perceived but its “existence” cannot be fully understood, even if it can be identified, one must consider whether the factual relationship that the perceived “existence” is truly that object can be established.

Focusing on this point, the artist slips into our perception, which easily reaches conclusions when looking at a particular object, and questions visible “existence.” If we rely on a visible cross section and infer even the invisible parts, defining it as the existence of a complete form, does it truly exist? Yet the artist does not rashly determine it.

Instead, he presents a new perspective by emphasizing that no one can know whether some object is truly hidden within his work, or whether the shape distinguished by the naked eye actually exists.

Just as anxiety and void, deeply rooted in the lives of contemporary people, do not easily disappear even though society turns away from them, human beings live with the conviction that an object exists even when the existence of that object is unclear. In his recent works, which investigate the fundamental uncertainty of existence, additional elements are minimized, and movement and narrative are restrained.

In his own picture planes, staged only with simplified lines and curves within thoroughly restrained canvases, subject and background may seem to be clearly divided, but they are not. Because the existence of the elements composing the painting is itself uncertain, the artist asks viewers to reflect on human perception.

Lawrence Jefferies Co., Ltd.
Minji Kim

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