Unconventional Landscapes and Healing of Image - Soun Hong

SIDESCAPE by Soun Hong 

(Nov. 11 - Dec. 9 2012)

Soun  Hong’s painting called Sidescape suggests a new perspective on landscape art which is stereotypical landscapes as we know.

His view of the traditional landscape is that it is merely a visual representation of a specific scene in nature using an arbitrary method. 

A landscape is a combination of various components (such as mountains, trees, streets, and houses) which the artist’s eye plucks from the environment and puts into a frame according to the composition and formation which is considered to be acceptable at the time. 

What's more, his Sidescape painting is a landscape which is composed of excerpts from a part of one image; it is a cropped, fragmented,deficient landscape. However, the source of this image is another image, not an actual scene in nature or an actual event.

In his painting, nature is not an unpredictable force. It is a contained element, similar to the way that information from internet or mass media can be captured and consumed at any time by any person. The event depicted in his painting is in a similar context.

The events that Sidescape has chosen are not something that the artist has collected while risking his life in the middle of a war on some deadly battlefield. The source of all those events is just a series of images. The source comes not from the origin of the events’, but from news footage of those events.

Sim, Sang Yong  

PhD., Art History, Professer, Dongduk Women’s University

“Like our lives always do, a painting gets off the track of logic. As a painting, which is riddled with full of uncertainties, is interpreted in a logical constructs of a critic, the light of the painting fades away. Then, it becomes famous in a secular world.” 

                                                - Artist's Note -