LONDON.- The Korean artist studied Painting in Seoul and New York, and now lives near Seoul. Over a period of thirty years, Hong Sooyeon has developed a distinctive art practice in which her paintings present the viewer with an area of focus, an amorphous, shifting, translucent ‘figure’, which is located within a flatly painted peripheral ‘ground’. This ‘figure’ seems to be three-dimensional; it is modelled as if in relation to some specific light source. But this strange ‘figure’ is not comparable to anything we are likely to see in figurative art, or in a photograph, or during normal daily life. Hong Sooyeon’s work remains mimetic – it is an imitation - but it is not mimetic of something with a recognizable appearance.

The visual characteristics of her ‘figure’ invite descriptive words like flow, liquidity, movement, homogeneity, formlessness, unfixity, translucency, vagueness, indeterminacy, convergence, divergence, blending, shifting chromatic intensity, etc. These characteristics match and connect up with - they imitate - something that can be experienced but is invisible to the naked eye (or the camera lens). This ‘something’ is reality-as-flow. When reality is perceived as ‘flow’ we are not experiencing it in accordance with the normal way of organizing the perceptual world, which is organizing into a pattern based on the separation between a ‘figure’ and a ‘ground’. We divide what we see into an area of focused attention, the ‘figure’, and leave the rest as a general field of unattended, unfocused, ‘ground’.

Once Western artists dispensed with the conventions of fixed-point perspective and ‘went abstract’, they did not necessarily abandon in their paintings this basic segregation or hierarchy within normal visual attention. Even apparently non-figurative, ‘abstract’ works can still possess this compositional duality through relations of form and colour variation. One possible way of overcoming the figure/ground gestalt in painting is through producing an ‘all-over’ surface, one in which the viewer’s attention is not drawn to anywhere in particular. The whole surface is a ‘ground’, or, conversely, a single ‘figure’ marked out against the ‘ground’ of the wall upon which the work is hung. At the same time, artists used the painting surface as a field within which to engage in the activity of spreading paint across the flat surface. This led to what American artists in the late 1950s and 1960s liked to call the end of ‘relational’ painting. Since then, many painters have adopted the conventional of the non-relational surface, of which the most extreme expression is the monochrome.

To describe reality as ‘flow’ is common in traditional East Asian philosophies and religions. For example, in Buddhism there is the fundamental recognition that everything is perpetually changing and inter-connected. The belief is that separating our perceptual field into figure and ground contradicts a deeper, more authentic, experience of reality, as an undivided whole of which we are an intrinsic part. In the Western tradition, by contrast, the exploration of reality-as-flow has been almost wholly absent – at least until very recently, and then largely thanks to the influence of East Asian thought. As a result, Western artists’ use of the ‘all-over’ surface was usually understood to be because they were interested in removing illusionistic space from their paintings and making it flat and materially present.

These Western innovations were adopted by Korean artists associated with Dansaekhwa (the Korean word means ‘One-colour-painting’) who from the mid-1970s used all-over and monochromatic styles, and developed specific process-based approaches. But unlike Western exponents, Dansaekhwa artists were interested in non-relational and process-based innovations not so much in order to unshackle painting from the codes of representation that dominated the West since the Renaissance, but rather so as to explore their ongoing relationship with traditional East Asian art’s goal of expressing the experience of reality-as-flow.

Hong Sooyeon’s work has been related to Dansaekhwa, but is actually fundamentally different. She does not create an ‘all-over’ surface. In addition to performing reality-as-flow through the painting process, she also represents reality-as-flow. Her paintings are on the one hand enactments of the experience of reality-as-flow through the various processes she has developed in order to apply and mix paint on a horizontally oriented canvas. Her physical, interactive engagement, involving chance and control, produces the visual effects described above. But on the other hand, Hong Sooyeon renders reality-as-flow mimetically, as an image - as a specimen-like ‘figure’ sited centrally on a flat finite ‘ground’ which is limited in extension by the straight edges of the canvas support. She thereby distances herself from the flow-effect by turning it into a ‘figure’ located within the controlled environment of a circumscribed ‘ground’. As a result, Hong Sooyeon’s work can be understood as a compelling attempt within painting to merge traditionally Western and Eastern concepts concerning the nature of reality, and how to depict it in art.

-Simon Morley art critic and published author