Artist Hong Seung-Hye (b. 1959) has experimented with a variety of media, including painting, collage, installation, sculpture, graphics, and animation, to expand her artistic practice. In particular, Hong combines, disassembles, and accumulates rectangular pixels, a basic unit of digital imagery, to create proliferating forms that are organic and dynamic. These images go through a number of formal transformations as they move out of the computer monitor into everyday spaces, expanding to flat and sculptural forms, animation, design, and architecture.

As such, with a sustained interest in abstraction-as-spatial construction, Hong explores the relationship between the work’s inner structure and the architectural space where it manifests a reality where geometric abstraction comes to life.

While studying in France, Hong studied under Olivier Debré, who works in French Art Informel, and became interested in the physical conditions and points that make up a painting rather than representation the outside world. In the early 90s, the artist was influenced by the Support-Surface group, a group that completely dismantled the canvas and used it as a physical support, and began to make collage works using paper.

Starting with collage works in which she cut and crumpled paper and manipulated the canvas freely, in her 1995 solo exhibition at the Kukje Gallery, she borrowed a ready-made mold to cut and paint hardboard paper and then collaged it.

In 1997, at a time when all information was computerized, the artist began using computers to create her work. At first, she used the basic program Microsoft Paint to create shapes, and then she used the program Photoshop to create patterns. For her, the monitor screen is like a giant natural system. The process of pixels coming together to form shapes is similar to the sprouting and growth of life in the natural world.

The Organic Geometry series also originated from this view of pixels as cells. Beginning with her solo exhibition “Organic Geometry” at the Kukje Gallery in 1997, Hong Seung-Hye has been deeply interested in the operation of physical space based on the construction of computer pixels.

Starting from the idea of “What if the shapes in the frame come out of the frame?”, the artist created shaped canvases in the form of reliefs using aluminum panels, in which the shapes become a single body and are attached to the wall, or works in which the artist sees tiles as an extension of pixels and spatially expands them by attaching tiles with transferred shapes to the wall or floor.

The artist describes her work as “organic geometry”. In fact, the words that make up the title, “organic” and “geometry,” are contradictory. 'Organic' is natural and uncertain, while 'geometry' is mechanical and stable. Hong explains that she finds artistic meaning in embracing the two extremes of these contradictions and using the unexpected conditions she encounters as rules for building her own “ideal world.”

In the process of deconstructing the existing shapes, Hong witnesses how the shapes, like amoebas, come back to life after being cut. Debris (2008), a work that began at this time, reflects the artist's view that unexpected forms are created when images that she thought were already completed are deconstructed, and that the resulting forms become the starting point for creating new forms.

For example, some of the aluminum panel works she has made in the past are cut into thin slices and recreated on one side of an aluminum pipe, which she displays as the actual material. This is an organic way of working, in which the finished work is transformed into a material for further work, infinitely recombined in different ways, and displayed anew. For example, in order to express that the results are not fixed, the work Debris was installed and exhibited differently each time in the past exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon.

Since then, Hong has expanded her work into a more spatial realm. In 2003, Hong exhibited Organic Geometry as a public installation in the lobby of the Gangnam Kyobo Tower, designed by architect Mario Botta. Considering the sculptural context of the building, the artist harmonized her work with the symmetrical structure of the building by installing it in a symmetrical form.

In her solo exhibition “Square Square” at the Atelier Hermès in 2012, the artist transformed the exhibition space into a square, taking into account the sculptural characteristics of the building itself. Hong came up with the word “Square Square” when she saw the cube-like structure of the Atelier Hermès building.

'Square' means both a quadrangle and a plaza, but the artist focused more on the meaning of a plaza. In response, the artist interpreted the meaning of ‘quadrangle square’ as an element of ‘plaza square’ or ‘quadrangle as a plaza’ in a form that can be coordinated with the audience's daily movements, such as placing works where people can sit and rest, or making the floor like a sidewalk block so that they can cross.

Hong further developed her shapes into animations and began working on the ‘Dancing Geometry’ series. She found that music was an essential element in bringing movement to her shapes, so she chose songs that she listens to and had her shapes dance to them. The songs Hong chose happened to be in the sad minor key, which inspired her to name the series ‘The Sentimental.’

The Sentimental series, which consists of nine works in total, is based on pre-existing music, and later, using Apple's software program Garage Band, the artist created dancing geometries based on her own compositions. In her solo exhibition “My Garage Band” at Space Willing N Dealing in 2016, Hong presented a video show in which a band composed of Photoshopped human pictograms moved in Flash animation to a soundtrack created by the artist.

In this way, Hong's organic geometries are constantly assembled, deconstructed, and multiplied through constant experimentation with the medium. In her solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery last year, she presented a new work in which she used the opportunity of the exhibition to learn Adobe Illustrator to create a work of practice. Hong's grid-based works are now freed from the confines of pixels, freely crossing over various media, disappearing, and reassembling in an organic process. Furthermore, the artist has continued to intervene in our reality beyond the frame.

“I expect art to make life more interesting than art, and as an artist, I want to play that role.” (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, MMCA Artist Talk | Hong Seung-Hye, 2021)

Born in Seoul in 1959, Hong Seung-Hye studied fine art at Seoul National University, receiving her B.F.A. in 1982. She went on to attend Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, graduating in 1986. Since then, Hong has held more than thirty solo exhibitions at various institutions including Kukje Gallery, Atelier Hermès, SeMA Buk-Seoul Museum of Art.

She participated in numerous shows both in Korea and abroad, including Gwangju, Busan, and the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, as well as major group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Seoul Museum of Art, Ilmin Museum of Art, Korean Cultural Center in Paris, and The Museum of Modern Art of Bologna. The recipient of the Total Art Award (1997) and the Lee Jungseop Award (2007), Hong’s works are part of the collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Leeum Museum of Art, Sungkok Art Museum, and Art Sonje Center.

References

• 국제갤러리, 복선伏線을 넘어서 II (Kukje Gallery, Over the Layers II) :
  
• 국립현대미술관, MMCA 작가와의 대화 | 홍승혜 작가 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, MMCA Artist Talk | Hong Seung-Hye) :
  
• 스페이스 윌랭앤딜링, 나의 개러지 밴드 (Space Willing N Dealing, My Garage Band) :