web: www.minjoonhong.com
instagram: minjoonhong

Artist's statement

The competition in major cities is fierce. Chronic feelings of anxiety have captured me, living with people obsessed with success: falling behind in the competition and being alienated from others. I am dealing with this urban life that elevates the chronic anxiety as a main theme. Dis-used wrapping paper and building materials once used to compose cities, which exist in people’s lives; are the dominant materials for my artworks whose subject matter is the city. I find and collect these waste objects from the streets. I dissect their original forms and functions and reassemble these collected materials in my own way. Through this process, I make three-dimensional installations. The vertical and horizontal shapes, the installation brings to mind the images (skyline) of buildings in cities. On the surfaces of these sculptural works, I unfold my impression of cities through ink pen drawings. The consistent thickness of the line tightly drawn into hatches with ink pen fills the surface in an even manner particular to this medium. Unlike the various thicknesses of pencil and infinite colors of painting pigments, the monochromatic pen drawings are expressed by methodic composition of lines. Currently, the finished visual outputs are arranged in different work, which are a response to the real space and transformed as the images spread out to the flat field. The stray thoughts about life in the city are another subject matter, which progress concurrently within these works. The conflictions and questions that have been generated by the relations with others – from kinship, regionalism and school relations to acquaintances–which have been accumulated from my childhood are not just simple memories to me. These memories serve as a catalyst to form my individual attitude toward contemporary society. I am interested in analyzing ‘uncomfortable memories’ and constructing a new narrative by pushing it further and fleshing it out, in my own way, the results of imagination or inferred hypotheses. The new narration is re-enacted on film with real people and recorded with video. As a result, these outcomes are delivered to audiences with the feeling of anger and self-mocking and the tone of wit and satire.

Each result has a different form according to its individual subject. These processes and outcomes temporarily resolve the first reference ‘chronic anxiety’. In addition, by expressing a “personal retaliation” towards the cities that gave me these impressions; I can feel a small sense of accomplishment.

Various contemporary artists expand their personal interests into the public arena through diverse media. This is possible because the process of converting personal memories and experiences into art works contains numerous meanings and elements of debate in the society and culture. By sharing these artistic attitudes, I aim to confirm that it can go beyond the activity of merely exposing social problems related to the individual; ‘Joonhong Min’ and become diverse records about phenomena, and attempt to make such a characteristic into a tangible and visual result.