Hong Soun

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.