We sat down with painter Hong Sooyoen during her exhibition In the Flow, open at our 45 Albemarle Street gallery in London. Hong’s first solo presentation in the United Kingdom, this show, on view through April 19, spotlights new works created by the artist during her recent figurative exploration between 2018 and 2024.
Hong discusses the psychological and emotional resonances of the perception of reality as a whole, delving into the ways painting can reflect one’s interaction with the external and internal elements at once.
Working with the themes of chance and control in her art practice, Hong’s art is close to Dansaekwa, the monochromatic Korean art movement that is deeply involved with the physicality of painting. Similarly, the surface of her paintings is in monochrome. In this context the canvas is to be understood as a ‘transparent’ or ‘clear’ space. This transparency, however, also shows an initial state in which we see a preliminary figure and movement and reflections happening in-between as a flow.
At the same time Hong explores temporality in her paintings by working with the concept of ‘right timing,’ where she has her own rules to control interactions among factors of painting procedures, such as accurate thickness of paints, the speed and pressure of brushstrokes, and the time allowed for drying.
‘I’m still fond of feeling tension, but on the occasion of this exhibition I was hoping to release the state of tension by exploding two confronting matters at their extremes,’ Hong says.
Her canvas becomes a body that takes the role of a vital medium as an instrument that reflects the conscious and unconscious. We often consider dichotomous notions to be incompatible, such as dream and reality, black and white, but those that seem to be operating at the extremes are in fact interdependent and blended to the extent that they can’t be divided by a boundary.
‘I believe that two confronting notions coincide at some point between the extremes or pursue balance by instinct.’ Hong continues.
The Korean female artist also sheds light on the nuances of her latest works, in which she explored a new vocabulary of movement, liquidity, and often minimal forms.
‘In my latest work at In the Flow, there’s a sense of ebullient freedom and ravishing beauty as my themes throughout the way I try to render a three-dimensional world in each painting.’ Sooyeon says, adding that her life and career are progressing 'in a continuous flow of experimentation.’
Hong Sooyeon, the Korean female artist who is exhibited at ‘In the Flow,’ says:
‘In my latest work at 'In the Flow’, there’s a sense of ebullient freedom and ravishing beauty as my themes throughout the way I try to render a three-dimensional world in each painting. I move from a two-dimensional art in terms of extendibility in time and space into a construct of reality as a continuous and seemingly flowing whole.
