Before departing for Paris in 1985, Soun Myung Hong studied in the harbor city of Busan, South Korea – a place that would shape his conceptual approach towards artmaking throughout his career. The liberal, creative atmosphere and the intellectual community of this international port city encouraged Hong to pursue a lifelong philosophical investigation into the relationship between parts and the whole.

Despite Hong’s penchant early on for working in different media, which ranged from printmaking to installation art, the themes of the impermanence of beauty and artificiality remained consistent throughout his various projects. In his large-scale multimedia pieces, Hong often used insects, animals, and other natural elements that are as essential to human life as water, soil, and light. With these projects, such as Insectopia (1999), Hong attempted to explore spaces and places that seemed mysteriously invisible to us; however, the works ultimately drew attention to our own culturally conditioned myopia.

Recently, Hong has developed a series of paintings entitled Side-scape (2004-07) and Allegory Landscape (2004-07). His paintings of rocks, mountains, and seashores are based on found images culled from daily newspapers, magazines, and the internet. Painted in subdued hues with an adept hand, Hong presents his viewers with a collection of beautiful, serene landscapes.

Reconstructed from only small fragments of the original photographs, which depict the violence of war, tragic accidents, and acts of terrorism, the paintings create multiple effects on the viewer: we simultaneously experience revulsion and euphoria knowing that these beautifully painted images are simply edited, prettified visions of the insidiousness of human nature. Hong eschews the realism of his borrowed subject matter, and his deliberately loose painting style provides few pictorial details, which gives his audience the impression that the painting is unfinished. The ambiguity of the pictures, which are based on fragments, invites his viewers to then consider what the whole might be. For Hong, the painting of parts is the ironic connection to the whole that the artist views as the zeitgeist in politics, cultures, and environments.

Influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s theory on simulacra in mass media, Hong’s paintings function as an analysis of the schism that exists between reality and its representation. In Side-scape and Allegory Landscape, Hong tests his own assumption that viewers would mistakenly visualize only scenic impressions through his representation of landscapes, rather than projecting a more complete picture of the horrifying reality on which the images are based.

- Hyunjin Shin