Soun HONG, Savina Museum of Contemporary Art
Birth
1959, Seoul
Genre
Painting, Installation, Photography
Homepage
SIDESCAPE_curated by Jae Hyun KANG
Soun Hong depicts landscapes from around the world, working from photos he plucks from the news rather than adhering to the conventions of landscape painting and sketching outdoors. To create his paintings, Hong first isolates the sections of images that surround the subject of a news story and then magnifies them so that they become meta-landscapes, which he calls “Sidescapes.” This exhibition, entitled ‘Sidescape,’ allows viewers to find meaning in the fragments of news photos painted by Hong and encourages us to look at the land and objects located just beyond the subjects of these photos from Hong’s unique perspective.
The artist has utilized the landscapes of tens of thousands of news photos, depicting them on canvases of various sizes in order to restrict his focus to the landscapes surrounding the reported events. In this way, he removes all traces of sociological and political interpretation imposed by the mass media, whereupon the conventional images characteristic of news photos are deconstructed and remade as wholly new landscapes.
In his “Sidescapes,” Hong visually disorients viewers through the use of ambiguous forms and colors, revealing the surrounding landscapes that made the image of the incident possible. These landscapes, existing though hitherto unseen, in turn serve to direct our thoughts toward other hidden parts of the world which can only be viewed through the eyes of a journalist.