Min Sunghong

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, sewn, and layered grids on top, offering a literal and conceptual representation of the landscape.

Circulating Body_Antenna Bird 

 Among the Circulating Body series, Antenna Bird is a human-shaped installation work combined with a crystal radio. The work captures surrounding radio waves and converts them into sound without using electricity. It functions as both a technical and metaphorical device that mediates flows emitted from somewhere yet not clearly perceived, or signals remaining in the gaps of sensation. Min explored the invisible currents within the complex networks of relationships that connect individuals, groups, and society, while also considering the senses that deviate from those flows.

'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.

Exercise for Painting

Objects pulverized with a wood chipper are reduced to small fragments and spread across rough painterly surfaces, like landscapes arranged within a grid. Lines drawn with ballpoint pen and chalk powder mark boundaries, divisions, and structural references. On the canvas, chalk powder becomes a medium that metaphorically evokes administrative and institutional frameworks, while the resulting surface forms a fluid and uncertain sensory terrain. In Practice for Painting, the fragments are not simply arranged, but accumulated in layers across the canvas. Beneath paint applied with a roller, they rise like reliefs, giving the surface a sculptural presence. The uneven canvas invites viewers to read and rearrange these scattered clues.

By placing fragments from different spaces and times onto a single surface, Min reconstructs multiple layers of time. The repeated traces of covering, folding, and accumulation suggest how time permeates objects, and what new temporalities emerge when those objects are displaced from their original context.

Exercise for Drawing_Fleck

In the Practice for Drawing series, pulverized fragments of objects are scattered across flat surfaces divided by lines made with multicolored ballpoint pens and chalk powder. A chalk line is a tool commonly used in architecture and carpentry to mark straight lines, functioning as a reference line for determining the position, boundaries, and divisions of a structure. The grid drawn with ballpoint pen serves as a metaphorical medium for administrative and institutional structures, while the landscape unfolding across it operates as a fluid and uncertain sensory terrain. On the canvas divided by straight lines, the disorderly positioned fragments suggest the place of beings that have deviated from, or been excluded from, the social environment or community. In particular, in Practice for Drawing, a line resembling a laser level crosses the center of the frame, which recalls the format of a Polaroid. While a laser level is used as a tool to divide and segment space in a “balanced” way, Min Seonghong’s line arranges the separate drawings within a spatial grid and connects them side by side, constructing an image of flow rather than rupture.

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).

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions include 《Receiver and Transmitter》 (Gallery Bundo, Daegu, 2023); 《Seeming of Seeming》 (gallerychosun, Seoul, 2022); 《Drift_Drifting object》 (Woomin Art Center, Cheongju, 2020); and 《Overlapped Sensibility》, (Art Loft, Brussels, 2018).

Group exhibitions include: 《Grid Island》 (Seoul Museum of Art, 2022); 《Museum Access: Through the Eco-Corridor》 (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, 2022); 《the Gwangju Biennale》 (2018); and 《D.N.A.》 (Daegu Art Museum, 2016).