Drawn Elephant : 추상 抽象  30 Aug. - 29 Oct. 2022 _ Coreana Museum of Art_ Seoul

What is Abstraction?
This may qualify as one of the most nebulous and complex questions of all times. Still, Sooyeon Hong is here, now, after extended ruminations on this very query. Abstraction basically refers to the act of singling out and depicting an image from a certain object or world. Her persistent pursuit of the essence of abstraction is the driving force behind Hong’s new initiative. Hong focused on the primitive concept of “abstraction” in her preparation for this solo exhibition, endeavoring to further approximate the essence of abstraction based on a self-critique of how her former understandings stopped short at the conceptual despite the trajectory of her career as an abstract artist. To Hong, who only recently noticed that the second character “Sang” in the Sino-Korean word “abstraction” (chusang: 抽象) refers to elephants(象) rather than the phonetically identical and more intuitive choice of form/shape(像), this exhibition is a journey of tracking, and drawing out the immanent elephant.

To me, the shapes depicted in the work of Hong Sooyeon somehow manage to seem concrete despite also resembling liquids caught just at the point of spreading. This may be because the fluid forms appear to be floating freely across the plane while at the same time being covered by a solid membrane. These ambiguous shapes made of some matter between a liquid and solid simultaneously suggest a sense of motion and of motionlessness, creating an impression of déjà vu regarding images in motion. The subtle balance between these two contradictory impressions is not only an aesthetic feature of Hong’s art, but also a characteristic closely engaged with the production process of her work.