Jayoung Hong (b. 1995) explores how humans have perceived nature and integrated it into systems of thought through various forms of gardens and past modes of play. She focuses on the multiple perspectives surrounding objects found in different eras, cultures, and in nature itself, and by reflecting these fluid shifts and transformations of perspective in her practice, she transforms the exhibition space into a site of visual play.

Jayoung Hong began her practice with an interest in the subjectivity that emerges when new aspects of an object are discovered—or when the object itself is transformed—through the act of prolonged observation. Just as looking functions as a crucial stage in her working process, her resulting works not only highlight visual elements but also actively invite the viewer’s own visual engagement and movement.

To encourage visual movement, Hong pays close attention to the “frame” that exists between the viewer and the object. Here, the frame signifies not only an awareness of the act of looking itself, but also everything that mediates it.
 
By weaving shifts of the frame into her work, she enables the free transformation and movement of perspective, offering multiple viewpoints. Through this, Hong hopes that viewers will follow these perspectives with their eyes, while imagining new spaces and times within their own minds—and finding pleasure in that process.

Her experiments with shifting frames are most evident in two representative strands of her practice: sculptures that construct landscapes and sculptures with interiors. The first type employs a frame set by the artist as a visual support, enabling viewers to gaze at a landscape through an aperture, or reconfiguring elements taken from their original sites into new, imagined sceneries.
 
For instance, the series ‘Peepject: Two Holes for Eyes x 3’ (2018–2020) consists of objects that require viewers to bend down or crouch in order to peer inside through small holes. By prompting such physical gestures, the objects transform the exhibition space into a kind of stage, where the audience becomes both the subject who looks and the performer who enacts movement.

Through this work, Hong explains that she sought to address “the shifting relationship between subject and object in the act of looking.” The viewer’s restricted field of vision becomes a “frame” that draws them into the miniature world of objects, evoking new bodily sensations.
 
In this way, the apertures that invite viewers to peer inside both limit their sight and, paradoxically, provoke a more active visual engagement. They compel attention to places one would not normally look and to objects that might otherwise be easily overlooked, transforming casual glances into acts of exploration.

In this way, Hong’s exploration of the movement of gaze and body naturally led her to an interest in Eastern philosophy and traditional East Asian painting, both of which embrace fluidity that shifts according to perspective. Among these, she was particularly drawn to sansuhwa (landscape painting), which captures not a literal reproduction of scenery but the diverse viewpoints of the person beholding it.
 
In sansuhwa, multiple perspectives are brought together within a single scene, reflecting the painter’s impressions of various landscapes encountered while wandering through nature. The elongated scroll format—whether horizontal or vertical—unfolds the painted landscape as if it were a journey, inviting the viewer’s eyes to traverse the scenery as though they were walking through the mountains themselves.

In East Asian landscape painting, this act of traveling with the eyes through an image is called wayu (臥遊), literally meaning “to wander while lying down.” First proposed by the painter Zong Bing during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the concept later developed through the painters of the Northern Song dynasty and became a foundational principle of East Asian landscape art.
 
Influenced by this tradition of wayu—which invites the viewer to journey through multiple perspectives, viewpoints, and embedded ideas—Hong began to explore the possibilities of diverse ways of seeing that have long been marginalized by the Western paradigm of ocularcentrism, which seeks to frame the world from a single, fixed point of view.

Building on her interest in sansuhwa, Beyond Landscape (2022) takes the form of a folding screen made from wooden structures onto which Hong brushes wax to depict a landscape. Unlike traditional ink landscapes, she employs wax as a material to create a relief-like effect, positioning the landscape somewhere between two and three dimensions.
 
Furthermore, by cutting holes into the screen, the artist allows the scenery beyond the artwork to enter the viewer’s line of sight. In this way, the viewer follows the painted landscape with their eyes while simultaneously shifting perspective toward the actual surroundings in which they stand.

Meanwhile, in Sansu Sculpture (2023), Jayoung Hong reinterprets Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Mountains and Streams by translating it into three dimensions. In the process of moving from the pictorial plane to a sculptural form, details that did not exist in the original painting were newly imagined and created by the artist.
 
Envisioning the unseen back, sides, and even the interior of rocks, Hong carved sand with water as if painting a landscape. Since sand sculptures cannot be preserved or transferred in their original form, the work was reproduced as a three-dimensional object through 3D scanning and printing technology.

The landscapes once seen by Fan Kuan are reimagined through the eyes and mind of Jayoung Hong, and the resulting three-dimensional Sansu Sculpture, layered with these overlapping perspectives, is explored anew through the viewer’s gaze. As audiences follow Hong’s landscapes with their eyes, they encounter smooth surfaces alongside uneven, densely textured contours, experiencing a tactile sense of “touching with the eyes.”
 
Supporting this work is Octagonal Rock Pedestal (팔각괴석받침) (2023), modeled after a rock pedestal at the site of Jagyeongjeon Hall in Changgyeonggung Palace. Hong relocates this pedestal—now merely an everyday object beside a bench—into her newly constructed landscape, drawing attention to details that had previously gone unnoticed within the original scenery.

In this way, her experiments with the tactility of vision and the act of isolating overlooked elements from an overall landscape to place them in new scenes also appear in her work reproducing historical artifacts or elements of traditional ornamentation.
 
Jayoung Hong has recreated decorative motifs found across various eras and cultures, including columns of traditional architecture, ancient murals, and rock pedestals, transforming them into sculptural forms. In the process, she selectively isolates and rearranges intricate and ornate components, constructing entirely new compositions from these elements.

For example, architectural decorations such as a fountain (Waterwall, 2021), a pillar head (Pillar Head, 2021), and a façade (Temple Facade, 2021) are transposed onto gallery walls like reliefs, creating entirely new landscapes. While referencing the originals, these works are rendered using a mix of sand and wax or gesso applied to sponge, emphasizing rough textures. The delicate and ornate details produced with coarse materials evoke a tactile and visual sensation distinct from the smoothness of the original works.

Hong reconstructs fleeting or easily overlooked scenes discovered in every corner of a landscape, as well as objects that span multiple eras and cultures, using fluid materials such as water, sand, and wax. In her work, water embodies time while remaining unfixed, offering a continuously flowing landscape.
 
For instance, she incorporates fountains as part of a sculpture, drawing attention to the dynamic movement of water, or allows viewers to trace landscapes reflected on the water’s surface. In the previously discussed work Sansu Sculpture, mist and water envelop the sculpture’s body, creating a scene in which they interact organically.
 
Splashing droplets generate ripples on the surface, which in turn form drops on the sculpture itself, while the swirling mist continually wraps and moves around the sculpture, adding a sense of motion to the otherwise stationary form.

Jayoung Hong also utilizes the material qualities of wax, which becomes painterly when melted and sculptural when solidified. For example, her large-scale door-shaped work The Gate of Wind and Water (2023) draws inspiration from the blue-and-white porcelain tradition found in both Eastern and Western cultures. She magnified and reduced the forms of mountains, clouds, and water that make up the landscape and applied them in wax onto tiles.
 
Inspired by the European practice of decorating doors and walls with blue-and-white tiles, she installed twelve of these works in the shape of a door, creating a landscape that unfolds beyond them. In this work, the wax—applied on top of the tiles—is carved, layered, and erased, producing various accidental effects and positioning the piece in an intermediate space between painting and relief sculpture.

Since 2023, Hong has begun creating “sculptures with interiors,” inspired by the concept of “architectural sculpture” after reading books by first-generation American curator Lucy Lippard. While conventional sculptures emphasize the exterior and conceal the interior, architectural sculpture functions like a building, containing an internal space and serving as a kind of shelter.
 
Hong regards caves, bowls, and shells as prototypes for sculptures with interiors, and she incorporates these materials into her work or creates ceramic pieces capable of holding something inside.

For example, Statue of Goddess from Water (2023), made from seashells, stones, and cuttlebone, is based on the imagined discovery of a goddess statue from an ancient matriarchal society beneath the sea.
 
She imagined what the form of a goddess might have been if a society led and guided by women had persisted, and instead of a vertical figure, she conceived the goddess as a natural form (mountain) with an internal cavity, echoing a womb that nurtures life. Accordingly, she created a structure of three overlapping mountain peaks containing space and collaged materials found in nature onto them, imparting color and form.

Building on this interest, recently Jayoung Hong has been creating works that allow viewers to peer inside like a tunnel while also seeing the landscape beyond the openings (the ‘Layers Tunnel’ series, 2024). She has continued to experiment with arranging sculptures to form gardens (《Between Lying Columns》, Ponetive Space, 2024) and reconfiguring landscapes discovered in the interaction between nature and humans from multiple sculptural viewpoints (《Winter Sculpture with Warming Vegetables》, Gallery2, 2025).
 
Hong’s practice, which presents diverse perspectives and viewpoints, awakens the sense of seeing through multiple sensory channels in today’s environment, where everything is quickly observed and forgotten, and embodies the dynamism of the act of looking. As she describes herself, “a maker of playgrounds for the eyes,” her open-structured sculptures guide the gaze inward while inviting the viewer to imagine beyond, creating a new space for visual play.

 “Through my creations, I want to offer diverse perspectives. My goal is to unfold new spatiotemporal experiences in each viewer’s mind through this process.”    (Jayoung Hong, excerpted from a Daily Art interview)

Jayoung Hong graduated with a BFA in Fine Arts from Korea National University of Arts. Her solo exhibitions include 《Winter Sculpture with Warming Vegetables》 (Gallery2, Seoul, 2025) and 《Between Lying Columns》 (Ponetive Space, Paju, 2024).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Correspondences》 (Shinhan Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《Firsthand Shop》 (CHAMBER, Seoul, 2024), 《Defragmentation》 (Mullae Art Space, Seoul, 2023), 《Peer to Peer》 (SPACE ON 洙, Seoul, 2022), 《The…Saver》 (Audio Visual Pavilion, Seoul, 2022), 《Kak》 (HITE Collection, Seoul, 2022), and 《Comma to Comma》 (Seoul Community Cultural Center Seogyo, Seoul, 2022).
 
In 2023, she was selected as a 7th-generation Open Studio artist at the Uijeongbu Art Library.

References

• 홍자영, Jayoung Hong (Artist Website)
• 비애티튜드, 눈(目)의 놀이터를 만드는 사람
• 루이즈더우먼, 홍자영 (Louise the Women, Jayoung Hong)
• 권정현, 눈으로 더듬는 조각 – 홍자영의 조각에 대하여
• 데일리아트, [청년 작가 열전 ⑧] 산수화를 재창조하는 작가 – 홍자영(1)