Kong Sunghun (b. 1965) received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Seoul National University’s Painting Department and studied electronic engineering at Seoul National University of Technology. Since his first solo exhibition “Blind Work” at Kwanhoon Gallery in 1991, he has held multiple solo exhibitions with various galleries, including Kumho Museum of Art, Keumsan Gallery, Art forum Newgate, Art Space Pool, and Arario Gallery. Kong has participated in various group exhibitions at home and abroad including the Gwangju Biennale, and Busan Biennale. He is the winner of the 2013 Korea Artist Prize from National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and currently serves on the faculty at Sungkyunkwan University’s School of Art, Korea, MMCA.
As a representative media artist in the 1990s, Kong Sunghun would experiment with conceptual installations, multi-slide projections, and painting with dust. Kong, however, has been focusing on oil painting since the late 1990s, saying that painting is the perfect medium to show every process of thinking and action. His main subjects are people or objects found in familiar surroundings like his atelier and house, or in nature, but he rendered them unfamiliar by putting them in a strange setting or painting them with unique colors, executing extremely diverse brush stroke techniques. Through his works, he transforms familiar spaces where daily life takes place into unrealistic images, casting light on a contemporary man’s anxiety and solitude. In his “Dusty Landscape” series, Kong has focused on sunrise or sunset at the moment when light and darkness overlap.
