Critic by Jang Taeyeong
The artist’s first impression of the ideal is thus obscure and dark. The ideal, the paradise is a sort of simulacra which men have created for escapist consolation. It does not exist and yet feels real, sometimes more real than things which do exist. For Hong yoojoo, the room is a time-space where simulation creates this simulacre.
The artist, through dream which is a direct simulation, relates memories and consciousness about various events to her subconscious. To the artist, dream is a direct medium which refines information from the real world into a state of loss and oblivion, realizing a sense of identity in subconscious. This is reproduced as a real desire for expression, a realisation of the ideal as a time of rest and space of comfort, through tenebrous colours on canvas.
What the artist so strongly desired to reveal, her subconscious, is a voluntary signal to re-establish out of repressed boundaries; the unrecognized, dormant consciousness of the artist germinates under certain circumstances. So rather than being a subconscious, it is a sense of identity which had long been repressed – a code which seeks to recognise the reality under oppression and to regain free will from repression. It is a healing ritual, a sacrament of regeneration.
The artist’s works show objects and spaces that are always dark and obscure.
They are scarily serene and silent. Those are the most significant feature of Hong’s works.
Silent situations, like serenity, make us feel foreign and fear. And yet,
incomplete emotions and serenity in the conscious sometimes lead to the extinction of that incompleteness. This can be compared to a certain period of stillness required to eliminate all waves from the surface of water after an impact. Thus the artist’s quietness in darkness represents rest.
“Darkness, like cactus which has grown quietly in my room, comes across as an alien and scary figure; but in a moment it fills up the space and breaths with me.”
“Low light creates various colours thorough sense, consciousness and change in space; night, then, is the space beyond the conscious where the original form, without phenomena, is visible.” Thus spoke the artist.
This silent space of tenebrosity, which the artist recognizes as darkness, represents a place of perfect refuge; an absolutely independent space, a safe haven granted only to the self. This resembles the peace of the origin of the world or the mother’s womb, a space of calm. As such, for the artist, this is a space of self-purification where inner sense of loss, repression, as well as all memories and senses of reality, are eradicated; it is also a space of restoration where zero-vibration returns the self to a zero state. This complex is what the artists means by paradise, the ideal space.
In order to express this space, the artist “uses cotton cloth for warmth and softness, conte and charcoal for freedom and flexibility, and ink powder and ink stone for that deep and warm darkness.”
Softness, warmth, freedom, and flexibility are psychological expressions which the artist seeks to give to the space. Hong’s expressive intentions show that the negative images of tenebrosity are turned around, put to ironic methods in approach. Here, the artist reverses a contrast between two opposing concepts through the ideal space.
We often see two opposing concepts forming a harmony to produce new values in nature. The nature’s power of harmony creates life, whose meaning has always served as the basis of humanity’s realisation of self-value.
Hong, through the expression of tenebrosity which aspires to the ideal space, hints at this natural mechanism; this is because the vitality of purification and restoration is shown in the artist’s own life.
That sense of relative loss and loneliness which one feels when one expands one’s life, either independently or through organic relations with society, darkens and depresses the life of modern humanity because we simply cannot give up on such expansion. I hope that the exhibition allows us to take full helpings of that meaning of life which Hong wishes to restore for us.
162x130cm_2016