Welcome, and thank you for visiting my modest gallery tucked away in a quiet corner.

Here you will find a variety of my works—large and small, diverse in character and spirit. I arranged them in this way because, seen together, they may give you a clearer sense of who I am.

To be honest, I often feel my lack of formal training and the limited time I have been able to devote to art. Yet I continue without pause—feeling, learning, and growing in the process.

I am not a master of any single field, nor do I belong wholly to any place. Take what you see as it is, and carry with you whatever impressions remain. Though I began in earnest later in life, I have always sought to keep faith with my first intent—to let neither results nor criticism define me, but to follow the quiet integrity of my own path in art.

At times, a sudden impulse led me to submit small works to competitions, and a few were recognized. In Korea, I once taught art at a high school for about ten years. In 2009, after twenty years of living in Australia, I returned to Korea, where I now work as a sculptor. That, in essence, is the whole of my artistic journey.

I have no interest in heavy philosophy. What moves me are the kinds of impressions that feel like music, and the vivid realities that the world tirelessly brings forth.

I love travel and every kind of documentary, and hold special respect for the creators of BBC Earth, whose programs I watch with admiration. And one thing is certain: without music, I imagine my veins would carry nothing but plain water.

Perhaps artists are simply those who live in the busy square between the entrance of expectation and the exit of fulfillment.

Even if you arrived here by chance, I am grateful.

Yoonki Hong
Born 1952

ADORE-GALLERY
85 Cheongun-ro, Mungyeong-eup, Mungyeong-si Gyeongsangbuk-do, Republic of Korea

Blog

Poems & Writing

Sitting on the Hil

I place my body
upon a corner where the clouds begin to scatter.
Within a single blade of grass
rests a heart I never managed to cleanse,
and all this is merely the passing of the wind.

And when at last
all the water within my flesh has dried away,
may that vanished fragment of cloud
become the rain someone longed for,
and may these dried stems of grass
become winter fodder for another life.

Beloved—
you whom I love, gentle woman—
become at least the snow
and cover the body of this wanderer.
Then, with the deepest voice,
I shall send forth a gratitude rising in tears.

 

 

Sitting on the Hill is the very first sculpture of my life, created with aluminum mesh after finally solving the most fundamental problem of my fifteen years of wandering: securing a workspace and finding sculptural materials appropriate to my circumstances. During those long years, I lived in constant desperation and endless contemplation over how it might ever become possible to do the sculptural work I longed for so deeply. I told myself that, at the very least, I should continue sketching ideas, and before I knew it the number had grown into the hundreds. I felt I could not delay even for a moment.

At the time, so excited was I that I impatiently dreamed of making at least one sculpture each month. While enlarging a small sketch drawn on graph paper into an aluminum mesh body, I somehow miscalculated and made the thickness of the arms nearly twice what they should have been.

Something about it felt strange, yet only long after completing the work did I finally discover the absurd source of the mistake. Truly unbelievable.

Every time I looked at the piece, I felt uncomfortable, and I kept thinking that one day I must correct it. But beginning last year, for one year and four months, personal circumstances prevented me from making any art at all. On top of that came the difficulties surrounding the cats living in and around my home, and life itself became overwhelmingly burdensome. I could not even imagine returning to the work.

Fortunately, one of the cats I am still medicating has recovered greatly, and that alone has eased my heart considerably. So I resolved firmly to begin working again. Yet when I stood before my workbench and tools, everything felt strangely unfamiliar, and I found myself reluctant to begin immediately. As a kind of warm-up, I decided first to repair this sculpture. Through partial dismantling and reassembly, it has now nearly reached completion once again.

A few more days of work, and it will be finished.

There is, however, one thing. According to the original sketch, the head should have been as thick as one square of the graph paper—the same width as the arm. But I deliberately ignored that and made it thin instead. The reason is that, sometimes during the making of a work, there are moments when I feel the work itself gradually becoming me. Simply put, there are moments when the work seems to speak to me and give instructions.

“Cut off the head.”

That was the voice this unfinished sculpture threw back at me.

Almost all artists hear this mysterious voice. A plan, by its nature, also possesses the tendency to delight in transformation.

The work exists within me, and I exist within the work. Much like when someone truly loves me, that person is already living within my heart, even if we have never once met.

Is that true?
I do not know for certain, haha!

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