Hong Soun (b. 1959) graduated from the Department of Fine Art Education at Pusan National University in 1983 before receiving his master’s degree from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, ENSBA, in 1989. He has held solo exhibitions at various venues, both domestic and international, including TEW Galleries, Atlanta, in 1989; Galerie Belle Froide, Paris, in 1993; Gallery Hyundai in 1999; Seo Gallery in 2007; “SIDE SCAPE” at Savina Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012; “The Margins of Spectacle” at Mimesis Art Museum in 2014; and “Above Us Only Sky” at Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, in 2016. He has also taken part in a number of group exhibitions including “Objet, 12 Artists’ Site” at Gallery Hyundai in 1981; “Salon de Mai” at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1989; “City and Media？Food, Clothing, Shelter” at Seoul Museum of Art in 1998; “The 1980’s Realism and the Age” at Gana Art Center in 2001; “The World of Expression” at Hangaram Museum of Seoul Arts Center in 2008; “DMZ Peace Project” at Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in 2012; “Plastic Myths” at Asia Culture Center in 2015; “Made in Seoul” at Abbaye St-Andre Centred’art contemporain, Meymac, France, in 2016; and “Voiceless: Return of the Foreclosed” at Seoul Museum of Art in 2018. He is also the recipient of the 1st Jeon Hyuck Lim Art Award in 2015 and the Lee In-seong Academy Award in 2016.
Hong Soun distinguished himself in lithography early on, majoring in the genre while studying in France. Nevertheless, he did not content himself with print technique and sought out new mediums of expression. Hong’s works in the GanaArt Collection were all created during this early phase of his career. They reflect the technical experiments involving collage, scraping, attaching, and spilling that he conducted during the early 1990s, and several works can be said to anticipate his future work. Greatly inspired by Werner Heisenberg’s book, Der Teil und das Ganze, Hong Soun began to reflect seriously on the possible role of fine art in the world, embarking in 2005 on a series of paintings known as “Side scape,” which reconstruct images from the media. These works suggest alternative perspectives on passing incidents and the artist’s surroundings by placing the focus on the surrounding landscape, instead of the center of the work in the process of editing the picture plane. In addition, he has also presented the “Memory scape” series of reborn objets created by combining the objects he had collected himself at the scenes
of various incidents. In this way, Hong places his focus on the stories taking place around us and sublimates those incidents and accidents into art, thereby exploring the false structures inherent in political power and ideology and gradually expanding his scope to stories taking place around the world.
