After an eight-year hiatus, Hong Myung-seop, an established artist recognized for reiecti ng the fixed concepts and values of the art world to mold his own unique artistic boundaries, featured an exhibition titled < Shadowless, Artless, Mindless— Creeping Pieces > at the OCI Museum last winter. In this exhibition, Hong showcased varied layers of artistic expression. The works, including ‘The Way of Existence of Body-Time’, which uses a lenticular method to show the ambivalence of flowers; ‘Running Railroad—Running Sound Road’, which portrays the artists will to express horizontality; and‘Waterproof’, his first ever sound installation work, all took up individual spaces inside the exhibition area. In Art Talk, we look into Hong's world through two different points of view: that of an established critic who has watched Hong's career develop over 20 years, and a young critic who has worked as an art journalist and curator.

Sculpture, as a way of dissipation and impermanence

Hong Myung-seop's sculptures are very unprecedented and strange in the context of Korea’s history of sculpture. His works revolve at quite a far distance away from traditional, socially accepted ideas and understandings. This is where his approach becomes self-reliant. With this, we need to pay attention to the fact that Hong's views on art, sculpture, and artists are carried through transparently in the whole of his works. Personally, I think it is very difficult to find an artist who clearly reveals his worldview through his work and life.

His works deviate vastly from the typically formalized take of other sculptures in that they do not focus on former trends, including converting the human body into various forms or showcasing the modification of substances. His approach is different from formal sculptural methods, imitation, or expression. Rather, his approach is formed by either rebelling or turning away from trends, current fashion, or the authoritative side of art world. Even so, his sculptures are based in a deep understanding of contemporary art and are made with philosophical and religious underpinnings. However, the works are not swayed by pedantic styles or excessive logicality. Thus, it seems he has always aimed to make art by creating distance and space between his life as an artist and the existing world of art. As such, his works focus on the space between substances and non-substances, meaning and meaninglessness, the visual and anti-visual, logic and anti-logic.

His philosophy on sculpture can be viewed as an anti-sculptural or anti-traditional approach. Hong Myung-seop's works are different from the same old figurative sculptures, modernist abstract sculptures which have now become the traditional style, and pale, material-based sculptures armed with empty logic or concepts. Hong continuously goes for the expansion of sculptural concepts. As the most fitting figure in Korean modernist sculpture in the truest sense, Hong Myung-seob's work, more than anything, is in discovering artistic elements, labeling and directing them, constantly raising certain questions rather than focusing on expression. This kind of extended, directed theory of sculpture, this conceptual sculptural language and cause, has provided a place for self-reflection and an extended meaning of sculpture for younger artists. However, this is not limited to sculptors alone. In conclusion, his presence and works are a rarity in contemporary Korean art and are its fruitful outcome, as well as a point of self-reflection.

Since his school days, Hong Myung-seob has tried to examine and reflect upon all past sculptural traditions. These efforts can be seen in his works, which focus on time and temporary, fleeting work relations. Even as early as the early 1980s, Hong has preferred his works to change moment by moment. For example, his use of materials that are rarely used in sculpture, such as paper and tape, shows this tendency. These materials do not have a lot of bulk or mass and are cheap, variable materials which naturally change over time. Through his paper casting works, Hong focuses on the nature of these materials, which are fragile and weak like the molted skin of insects, to deviate from the firm, heavy, lump-like sculptural materials he despises. This kind of mindset is an important motif in his works. The majority of his works, more than anything, resemble a life cycle, in that they become extinct. The key to his paper casting works also lies in the fact that although they exist for a set period of time, they become altered, shrink, or change color, becoming yellow with age. Hong does not want his works to last a long time. He wants them to live in a certain space, temporarily and coincidentally, and disappear after the exhibition is over. The works then become hard for anyone to actually possess. As such, his works center on something that is finite and coincidental, instead of being monumental or continuous.

“I create art not necessarily because I want to make something, but because I'm drawn by a certain path. I just see some kind of fate. If the path presents itself, then my work will approach me.” (Artist's notes)

So for Hong, to create art means both making and deviating. It is both meaningful yet meaningless, a source of both merit and trouble, a gain and a loss. Also, he has featured work in which he temporarily installed black tape in the exhibition area, only to remove it after the exhibition ended. This is his way of temporarily intervening in time and space and then disappearing.

“My works can only be realized by reaching the everyday environment, workspace, or exhibition platform. Also, these works do not possess any meaning in being preserved—​they are carried out much like how we contemplate life, are executed easily, much like how we relieve ourselves, and end without any need to cling on, the results being much like garbage, which breaks up and then disappears. This cycle of temporality and the destruction of form are interesting. Ever since I was young, I did not believe in any sort of human nature, like my individuality, and I did not hope to have any kind of long-lasting individuality. Even now, I want to break away from my present image, I think I need to break away from it. This is because to me, art begins when metaphysical problems begin to be shed. Literature stems from life's conflicts. Although people think that there is no meaning without these conflicts, the art I am aware of, at least, is not made with life's conflicts, in my opinion. It begins at the point of breaking away from the conflicts of the day, so it is actually unrelated to the conflicts of the day. In this sense, the art I believe in might be construed as lethargic. So the artistic sensibility I wish for lies in a point of partiality, where a certain lethargy that cannot resolve any sort of conflict has to be dealt with.” (Artist's notes)

He drew on the walls and floor of the exhibition space, a white square room, with black tape. This is reminiscent of a railroad, as the tape creates a topological change, as if it were expanding and unfolding space. Trains are a symbol of modernization a linear path carved into a curved, natural setting, wrinkling and de-wrinkling. The space, compressed by time and speed, changed our life. As such, modernization was realigned with train stations at its center. Hong Myung-seob spent his youth near train stations, and this experience must have served as a primitive memory.

Spending a depressing and lonely childhood at train stations, he must have often been lost in ideas of wanting to run away somewhere. Hong has sublimated these memories through his great installation works. There is nothing more important to an artist than experience or memory. However, having a lot of experience or memory doesn't automatically make you a good artist. The experience (being conscious of the experience) needs to sink in and be absorbed, becoming a part of you and coming out unconsciously. So, as Rike put it, a true poet is someone who can pull out a poem from his unconscious. It just has to be incarnated. Hong Myung-seob installed a train track of childhood memories in the exhibition space by merely stuck black tape onto the walls and floor of the space. But as soon as the thin tape is stuck to the space, a strange phase shift begins to occur. It feels as though the walls and floors are being reorganized into a single space. Through this, Hong conjures up the scenery of a railroad and the desire to follow the linear line to depart to another place. However, this work is not a realistic reproduction of a railway, and neither did the artist recreate the scene with related materials. The parasitic black tape on the walls and floor is not a lump of material that occupies space like other existing sculptures, nor does it convey any meaning. It is not an object containing some modern art theory, nor is it a monumental sculpture. Hong adamantly refuses to let his work be read as containing some kind of fixed meaning. For him, his work is a kind of device that creates “maximum conflict in our sensibilities.” Art is changing everyday objects into an artistic experience. With some cheap black tape and a knife, Hong creates a great artistic experience.

Hong Myung-seob is an artist who has consistently engrossed himself in conceptual installation work over a long period of time. For Hong, who refuses to let his work be read as having a fixed meaning, his work is a device. This device “is based on the interest formed between one person and another” and grants “maximum tension in expressing that interest.” In this sense, his works create “maximum conflict in our sensibilities.” Through his work, the artist wants to express and deliver both a kind of transcendental meditation and a will to be free from the conventions of the plastic arts.

Hong Myung-seop, Shadowless, Artless, Mindless, Creeping Pieces
Revolt of the Senses: Heading Your Way, Set to the Rhythm of My Body _ Lee Seulbi (Writer for [Monthly Art])
Walking into the weightlessness of truth _ Kim Ji-hae(Independent curator, aesthetics)