Hong Soun’s discipline in painting is described by a re-contextualization of images of people, objects, and situations based on photographic references, named in his past exhibitions as Sidescape works. His means of understanding how to address his concerns about the medium points towards an analysis of his observations on how photographs and paintings can be viewed, and this includes presenting a visual experience through extracting parts of images he has chosen from newsprint photographs. These are pictures of objects, people, current natural phenomena and socio-political happenings that are then dissected by the artist: he divides the imagery into segments and re-focuses the pictorial merit on the periphery of the scene by painting them individually. As an example, he references a war-related photograph by isolating areas such as the sky, ground, or a fragment from a wall or a person’s clothing. Using these sources, Hong overcomes the attributed functionalities of the objects and landscapes in the respective contexts of the moment they were captured on camera, thereby emphasizing the independence and transcendence of specific and/or implied situations.

Hong Soun was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1959. He graduated from the Busan National University in Korea and continued his studies at the École National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. The artist has been awarded nationally and internationally for his work and has participated in numerous exhibitions worldwide. Hong has been invited for solo exhibitions by the following institutions: the Maraya Art Center (Sharjah, AE), the Mimesis Art Museum (Paju, KR), the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Gwacheon, KR) and the Savina Museum of Contemporary Art (Soul, KR). He was part of the Santa Fe International Biennial in 2008 and his works are included in international institutional collections (i.e. Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, KR | Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, USA | Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyeonggi-do KR | Ho-Am Art Museum, Seoul, KR).

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