SungHong Min

The varied and theatrical practice of SungHong Min is filled with uncanny absurdities in detailed installations that meditate on what is visible and what's hidden in the contemporary social landscape.

Early Years

SungHong Min was born in 1972 in South Korea. He graduated from Chu-Gye University for the Arts, Seoul, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1999. Five years later, he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute.

For both his undergraduate and graduate degrees, SungHong Min specialised in painting, however, even early works such as The Island (2002) include sculptural elements. Over the course of his career to-date, the artist has retained a painterly approach while working predominantly in the three-dimensional.

SungHong Min Artworks

SungHong Min's sculptural vocabulary spreads out into a diverse range of intricate and often site-specific approaches. Gathering together items generally regarded as detritus to forge new connections and meanings between objects, the artist reflects on visibility and invisibility in photo collage, drawing, sculpture, and installation.

The 'Overlapped Sensibility' series

The concept of overlapping is key, both conceptually and materially, to SungHong Min's practice. In his 'Overlapped Sensibility' series, this motif is combined with his recurring use of the figure of the bird as an allegorical stand-in for the human social ecosystem.

In Overlapped Sensibility: Imbued (2015), a bird stands like a weathervane at the top of an illuminated roof structure, while a flock huddles inside. A birdhouse cast from a human home, the structure is architecturally reminiscent of medieval churches.

In Overlapped Sensibility: Carousel (2015), the birds reappear as ceramic bird heads resting atop wooden plinths of different shapes and sizes. The collection of figures is perched within a white motorised carousel, in reference to writer Haruki Murakami's description of the carousel as a metaphor for the fixed cycles of life, on which humans are trapped until death.

'Drift' works

The connections and divergences between the natural and the constructed landscape represents another cornerstone of SungHong Min's practice. Through a re-examination of standard interpretations of landscapes in the 'Drift' series, the artist seeks to reintroduce an uncertainty to the viewer's perspective. In Drift_Atypical (2020), SungHong Min has rearranged and combined landscape painting fragments into tent-like structures. These large, suspended shapes are covered in a grid and ringed by tassels, pulling them between the worlds of the clinical, the domestic and the majestic. For Drift_Exercise for variability (2020), Min has gathered discarded landscape paintings, folded and sewn them, and layered grids on top, offering a literal and conceptual reframing of the landscape.

'Skin_Layer' series

Sunghong Min collects belongings discarded in the course of urban development and relocation, combining them into spectral structures and installations. His work gives these residues new forms and lives, preserving traces of past use while commemorating their reincarnation.

Awards and Accolades

SungHong Min has been the recipient of multiple residencies and awards, including the Pakdongjun Prize (Visual Arts), P.D.J Memorial Foundation, Daegu (2023); the SeMA Nanji Residency, Seoul (2020); and the Woomin Art Award, Woomin Foundation, Cheongju (2019).