Review: Sungs-Sook Hong, A Korean Painter in Oxford

Mrs Sungook Hong (Setton) was born in South Korea in 1952.

After being trained as a nurse in Korea, she moved to Germany, where while working as a nurse she studied western painting with Professor Jederman of the Berliner Kunst Academy. Then she returned to Korea and studied traditional brush painting with Kwi-im Lee and Jung-muk Kim. This laid the foundation for her style, so that when she came to Oxford in 1986 she was able to both strengthen her eastern brush techniques under the guidance of Paul Chan and at same time to develop further her special interest in exploring the possibilities of combining western themes of watercolor landscape with eastern techniques.

This is a complex problem as each tradition has developed its own resolution and techniques of expressing light and colour and even atmosphere. Where western artists are acutely conscious of the atmospheric light, the season and weather, the eastern artist tends to try make a general statement of the aspects but is subtley conscious of the line, the surface balance of the pictorial composition and the texture of vegetation. The eastern artist may suppress the colour in order to catch nuances of line and tone. He rarely attempts to paint the colour of anything as emphemeral as sunlight, although he may use colour as a decorative feature as in painting flowers.

Thus it is that the painter who seeks to find his or her way between the two traditions has a rich field for exploration. Sungsook clearly sets forth on this with confidence and good humour. She is clearly conscious both of the possibilities and the pitfalls. Many artists have attempted this same path and have moved off to abstraction, but Sungsook seems to be determined not to go that way but to find a middle way to express a western landscape which has been much painted in western style in a way which expresses her own reaction both in techniques and in a style all her own.

-Miss M. Tregear (Keeper of the Department of Eastern art, Ashmolean Musem - summer,1991) -