Exhibition Information

Exhibition view

(Source = Kukje Gallery)

Exhibition view

(Source = Kukje Gallery)

Exhibition view

(Source = Kukje Gallery)

Exhibition view

(Source = Kukje Gallery)

			Kukje Gallery is pleased to present Over the Layers II, a solo exhibition of Hong Seung-Hye from February 9 to March 19, 2023. Hong has produced multimedia works using computer design software since 1997, starting with Microsoft Paint—a simple graphic program included with every Microsoft Windows—and eventually adopting Adobe Photoshop as her main tool. Employing these programs allowed her to continuously expand her vocabulary of pixels as she appropriated visual forms and graphic rules that reflect the popular landscape. For Hong, the closed systems of digital programs have allowed her to both frame her design methodology and freely proliferate her minimal forms, while developing a practice wherein she retraces and reflects on past works reusing elements as part of her artistic practice. It is this technique of recollection that underlined her last exhibition, Reminiscence, offering a direct clue as to her approach to memory and how we relate to shared iconography. In this endless process of recollection, past works become the material upon which new layers are built, as the passage of time becomes Hong’s most tangible fixation.
Since her solo exhibition Organic Geometry (1997) at Kukje Gallery, Hong has focused her attention on operating physical spaces based on networks of computer pixels. The upcoming exhibition is conceived as a sequel to Over the Layers (Kukje Gallery, 2004), an exhibition in which Hong aimed to break from the two-dimensional plane and capture the additional layers of space and time. Adopting the vector grammar of Illustrator for the first time, in addition to the raster-based graphics of Photoshop, Hong once again pushes her work into new dimensions. In this follow up to the first Over the Layers, using vectors allowed her to explore scale without any fear of pixilation and further to use color, freed from the limitations of the rectangular pixel. The work in Over the Layers II guides the viewers to the world beyond the rainbow formed by the artist’s explosively multiplied layers.
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(Source = Kukje Gallery)