Underworld: Eunjung Hwang
My work begins with creating countless characters drawn from dreams and the unconscious. Making characters is something I have done since childhood, and over the years I have created thousands. These characters emerge through automatic processes and continue to transform through endless reincarnation.
The narratives formed by these characters are connected by dream logic, circulating through an imagined cycle of childhood, dreams, death, and what comes after. This is less a story meant to be read than music meant to be felt and enjoyed.
Ghosts and the supernatural have always fascinated me. I explore images from early childhood and dreams, where living and ghosts are not yet separated, where nothing has been exorcised.
I have written many recommendation letters for former students, but Eunjung Hwang stands out. When she told me she planned to study in New York after graduation, I began her letter with words I may never use again: “Eunjung Hwang is a genius.” Even for someone as generous with praise as I am, this was the highest compliment. If “genius” sounds exaggerated, take it simply to mean innate talent. Despite her short period of formal artistic training, Hwang possesses remarkable natural ability. The sharp humour and wit with which she expresses the full range of human emotion in her original work are truly striking.
After graduating from Yonsei University with a degree in English literature, Eunjung Hwang painted on her own before transferring into the third year of Ewha Womans University’s Western Painting Department in 1997, where she studied for two years until graduation. I first met her around that time in a second-year drawing class. She was shy, very thin, and usually sat alone in a corner, drawing quietly in an awkward posture.
At the time, her paintings drew from childhood memories of home, everyday episodes, strangely shaped animals, ghost-like figures, and their relationships. The tangled, unreal images and faded colours created works that felt both humorous and ritualistic. She always drew freely and without hesitation. One day I asked her, “Eunjung, where do those ideas come from?” She pointed to her head and answered casually, “I don’t know. Ideas just keep coming from here.” Her innocent expression and voice still stay with me.
During one class, I assigned a project in which students had to closely read a book on modern art history, research every material used in the artworks, and then create a work using a material that interested them. For Hwang, who had never formally studied art before, the book was a treasure trove of artistic knowledge. She submitted an outstanding report, carefully underlining every material in blue coloured pencil. The report, rich in literary language and vivid descriptions of unusual materials, is something I still keep.
For her project material, she chose food. She made my portrait out of snacks, even including my dog. I still smile when I remember her waiting for me at the far end of a dark hallway outside my studio, peeking out like one of the ghosts from her drawings.
Eunjung Hwang has been living in New York for over ten years and continues to work actively. She travels widely each year, participating in numerous residency programs around the world, and recently taught a short drawing workshop in English at Ewha Womans University.
She still creates imagined characters from dreams and the unconscious, maintaining a lightness rather than excessive seriousness. These ghost-like, supernatural figures are endlessly reborn, growing, disappearing, and circulating as if in constant reincarnation. Moving freely across the boundary between life and death, Eunjung Hwang and her paintings now hum around us like familiar, endearing companions.
U Sunok (Artist, Professor at Ewha Woman’s University)