Sung Yeon-hwa

Poster of Flow at Gallery Joeun

Gallery Joeun is pleased to present the solo exhibition 《Flow》 by Sung Yeon-hwa (b. 1986) from December 19, 2023 to January 20, 2024. The artist captures her most “peaceful” and “tranquil” times and memories with her unique warm and restrained artistic language on the pigment-soaked Korean paper Hanji.

For the artist, who believes that old things have warmth, the most important materials for her work are Korean Hanji paper and pigments. The rough, unfinished handmade Korean paper is rubbed with a stone to create texture. The Korean paper is then burned with incense into a rectangular shape, and the cut Korean paper is placed on the canvas. Using the “medium color technique” in the traditional dyeing technique, she applies the pigment to the Hanji layer by layer, with the concentration sometimes deep and sometimes transparent. The color is then applied with acrylic paint and covered with kerosene, creating a strong texture despite the oriental painting.

성연화, Flow 23-100-008, 2023, Hanji, mixed media on canvas, 97 x 145.5 cm

On the Korean paper Hanji, whose density has been deepened by the soft soaked colors and the kerosene, the artist draws long, thin abstract lines with the middle tip of a calligraphy brush using the technique of the calligraphy brush. In a departure from traditional calligraphy, the artist’s free but restrained lines meet the stable composition of the Korean paper cut vertically and horizontally, creating a delicate formative tension. There is only one line in a work, and once it is set, it cannot be moved or changed. It is the final act and culmination of the completion of a work and at the same time the “artist herself”.

성연화, Serenity 23-100-033, 2023, Hanji, mixed media on canvas, 90.9 x 72.7

Sung Yeon-hwa believes that the power of storytelling lies in the essence of abstract painting. Ultimately, the artist tells her own story with her works. When she was a child, doodling freely and playing with cutting paper, everything was slow but at the same time life was natural and fulfilling. The warm space, the peaceful feelings and the scents she received from her mother and father allowed her body and mind to “tranquil”. The artist’s essentially quiet times, which could be the story of all of us, are perhaps relics of the analog era that are no longer felt in today’s highly developed digital society. The artist embodies the emotions of a time and space that may never return, and brings them back to us in an abstract work. The artist’s belief in analog esthetics may be the reason why she has spent a long time painstakingly burning each piece of Korean paper by hand with incense and insisting on treating it with kerosene. Accordingly, Jonghyo Cheong, chief curator of the Busan Museum of Art, comments: “This artist shows a well-intentioned obsession with trying to escape the digital age and convey peace from the memories of the self to others in an analog way.”

성연화, A Piece of the Mind 23-000-003, 2023, Hanji, mixed media on canvas, 27.3 x 22 cm

The artist, who is holding her first solo exhibition in the Hannam-dong space as the exclusive artist of Gallery Joeun, features her representative series in this exhibition. While “Serenity”, a warm brown color, conveys a piece of the artist’s most missed memory in her life, “Flow”, the title of this exhibition and another representative series, captures the artist’s present. The blue or green monochrome horizons that flow along the current epoch, time and air flow gradually gain depth and expand the infinite spectrum. Around 60 recent works from four series, including the “Identity” series with its free and restrained calligraphy and the Korean paper sculpture series “Piece of Mind”, offer the audience a “tranquility” full of sensitivity to analog esthetics in the form of various works ranging from small-format to large-format works including Hanji installations.

Installation View of Flow at Gallery Joeun

After graduating from the Faculty of Calligraphy at Keimyung College in Daegu, the artist studied modern abstract calligraphy in Japan and continues to develop the various expressive methods of hanji and calligraphy into her own unique artistic language. With her oriental-modern sensibility, she has been invited to a total of 9 solo exhibitions, including this one, despite her late debut, her first solo exhibition in 2019, and is quickly becoming an emerging artist in the Korean art scene. Not only has she participated in numerous overseas group exhibitions in France, Spain and the United States, but all of her works were sold out at the LA Art Show 2021, 2022, Focus Art Fair Paris 2022 and Art Miami 2022, attracting great interest from overseas. This year, the artist’s works appear in the Samsung Galaxy Watch advertisement (2023, filmed with Son Heung-min) and LG Ilum advertisement (2023, filmed with BTS RM), expanding her scope of work into commercial brand advertising.

Gallery Joeun
3, Itaewon-ro 55 ga-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
+82-2-790-5889

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