Raising up What Is Transparent and Thin - 안소연 미술평론가
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Euyoung Hong: The Hydrology Project
CMOA Daecheongho
August 4—October 22, 2023
Soyeon Ahn
Art Critic
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The Hydrology Project (2023), an exhibition of works by Euyoung Hong, shows the artist’s interest in the relationship between sculpture and “hydrology.” The grey concrete walls, floor and ceiling with steel panels exposed highlight the physical properties of the entire space rather than the imposition of the neutrality of the white cube. This tends to remind viewers of something which is cold and dry, and generates heat while condensing water within its surface, that is, the primal physical properties of a space. The exposure of building materials nudges viewers to a certain origin or extinction of a space despite its artificial characteristics. Such characteristics of the space take the category of Hong’s The Hydrology Project beyond the physical limits, continuing to express the abstract arbitrariness, such as time and space surrounded by emptiness and darkness. It suggestively guides such imaginative time and space where the material elements would be accepted as an entity.
The individual works that constitute The Hydrology Project include Negative Landscape (2023), Silver Flow (2023) and The Hydrology Project (2023), a sculptural work with the same title as the exhibition. In these works transparent glass, thin silver wires and other objets are arranged within a gray space with their surfaces transformed as if to disguise themselves. These individual works that share the weak and dim sensibilities of the physical properties maintain a state of visual tension with constituents standing low, hanging, or raised up about half with each supporting the other. The works seem to repeat construction and deconstruction, revealing the defense and protection mechanisms at the same time, transmitting the viewer’s sensibilities between tension and balance, allowing them to dig into their body, thus guiding their eyesight and body to move cautiously and steadily. For some, the works aim at amplifying to the utmost limit our experience of the moment we now face by intermingling the obsessive impulse of our sensibilities to see what is not seen with the anxiety that we might be led to an exceptional appearance of something we cannot now see.
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Euyoung Hong has, since the early phase of her career as an artist, been interested in deconstruction of a piece of architecture or place, using for her artistic creation fragments of building materials or other objects found at building sites, exploring their forms and physical properties through her unique aesthetic reconstruction. Discarded glass fragments have been her favorite material since the early days, as shown by her latest Negative Landscape series, which began in 2017 with the same-titled work wherein she placed plate glass fragments on top of each other, layer by layer, on a wheeled wooden board and secured them with elastic bands. In one of her latest works in the series, she created a three-dimensional structure of differently sized glass fragments using a minimum of parts, and erecting it in a space. A series of works she created recently using glass fragments from demolition sites suggest that Ms. Hong has been dedicated to aesthetic exploration not only of the function of the glass that divides, reduces or expands a space but also on its material characteristics connoting the potentiality for transparency, softness, dimness and sharpness.
In this exhibition focusing on “the cycle of water,” that is, the mobility of and changes in the phases of the invisible, visitors are guided to the aesthetic ideas and sensibilities of Euyoung Hong as an artist who approaches the cycle of matter metaphorically. The reference to a human figure, which sculpture (even abstract) implicates by nature, can be found in some of her works. Her viewers can often find in the composition and arrangement of specific objets personified choreographic forms reminding us of the actions of the actors performing their roles, while some stimulate our imagination of certain forms just like props on a theater stage. For example, the glass sculptures that appear to be entering the exhibition hall one step earlier than the viewers stand on the floor, combining themselves with sleek metal objets to maintain a balance of physical power. The wires and plates forming the structures are weak in the sense that they cannot stand on their own and accordingly are given a mandate to raise up themselves through combination and arrangement of power between themselves. It reminds one of the act of filling an empty space with invisible material gradually erected in the void, just like a pool created by the rain that has poured down all night long and gradually dries up, leaving behind its condensed form—transparent matter that enigmatically transforms itself.
The two sculptural forms hanging between The Hydrology Project appear like clouds due to the description of “the cycle of water” they are connected to. These forms, in the shape of misty bodies that can produce snow and then rain, appear either as shadows corresponding to the form of water lying above and below the surface of the earth, with a void between the two bodies, or images reflected from them. In fact, the structure of thin wires which, with their weak physical properties, constitute Hong’s Negative Landscape series maintains a kind of residue—just like the waste glass fragments a certain negative identity separated from the metal plates. For example, the spiral structure of metal wires was produced as the edge of a metal plate was “peeled” off in a spiral, resulting in long, thin metal wire that is easily bendable. That is why Negative Landscape is basically abstract “debris” that has survived around a certain form and material, guiding viewers to the experience and imagination of visual perception that shuttles between the sphere of the invisible and of the visible via (re)locating what is in the first sphere to the second.
To sculptors, the perception of what is negative is accumulated through experiences just like the mother tongue is acquired. Euyoung Hong perceives the fragmentary parts derived from a random whole, while expanding her interest as a sculptor in the category of the invisible. As a sculptor, she tries to “erect” in a space the reality reconstructed in the random physical property and form, transcending the visual experience of an uncertain subject. In addition, the dim, transparent forms that imply a series of movements—just like the movements of power—show a network of sensibilities that orchestrate elaborately the changes in matter and the transition of physical status.
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Let’s take a look at a different scene captured by one work in the Negative Landscape series. This one displays a separate, independent space and revives the structure and rhythm of that space, which is closer to a void, with narrow and transparent objets. Euyoung Hong has set up a white wall at the innermost part of the exhibition hall, and created an empty space in a corner where the wall meets the floor. The space has been planned for forms that are so thin and transparent that they are estranged from the visual category instantly as if shrouded in darkness. This space reveals the magic of three-dimensionality by which extremely thin, transparent and obscure objects are erected in a space through the network of power and form. In other words, viewers can witness forms which are not possible in reality standing before them as something that really exists while undergoing a radical change that reverses the physical properties and the status of existence in the physical relationship in which matter is exchanged. Objets such as pebbles and cords discovered around a lake makes up their surface, whose significance is not apprehensible, by spending the time of physical transformation underground, undergo the process of weathering and sedimentation. Euyoung Hong brought these objets to a three-dimensional space of white walls and floor and erected them in forms that reveal themselves in delicate light and shade.
These works show that Euyoung Hong is in line with the experiences and insights of many great sculptors in the past century who experimented to a great extent to rediscover new sculptural potentiality. Richard Serra, for example, was inspired by the movements of dancers when he had heavy steel plates lean on each other after being erected on the floor, while Eva Hesse erects hollowed latex structures and hangs materials such as thread, paper and fabric on the ceiling or wall to create a series of three-dimensional volumes. Euyoung Hong’s sculptural experiments seem to be aimed at creating an impossible form in a three-dimensional space. She is particularly keenly interested in the transformations of invisible materials or objects that have undergone the hardship of dismantlement or severe damage and the sculptural space formed out of such uncertain, precarious materials.
Meanwhile, The Hydrology Project reminds viewers of the sculptural process through which Euyoung Hong explores the material changes and forms freely crossing the border between the sphere of the invisible and the visible. This work, designed to collect air and change it into water which is, in turn, guided through a series of distillation processes, does not seek to explain the narration about the cycle of water but to attain sculptural perception and understanding of a certain random material or form which exists, in the three-dimensional world, in a state of uncertainty and lack of transparency, extending to the sculptural concept that continued to expand during the last century. The title of this paper, Raising up What Is Transparent and Thin, is related to the sculptural perception. Considering the efforts of modern sculptors who sought to approach “the existence of uncertainty” proven by the reality of three-dimensionality as well as the classical realization of the ideal of sculpture using large, hard and heavy materials marked by comprehensive and clear outlines, the experience we have whenever we face an incomplete reality which presupposes that no one can completely see its whole is connected with the perception and recognition of Negative Landscape presented by Euyoung Hong.