11 Jun 2009 — 11 Jul 2009
HONG SEUNG HYE
Musical Offering

Gallery 2 presents Hong Seung Hye’s solo show, Musical Offering, from 11th June for a month. Not only did Goethe, the eminent German writer, say that ‘architecture is a frozen music,’ but many painters including Monet and Kandinsky also commented on the relationship between music and visual form. Likewise, Hong Seung Hye pays attention to the similarity between musical formation and her own visual formation in this show.

The title ‘Musical Offering’ is named after the homonymous variations composed in the canonic style by J. S. Bach, based on a musical theme given by Frederick II of Prussia in 1747. ‘Canon,’ derived from the Greek word kan?on, meaning ‘rule,’ has its essence in self-reproducing and copying. The various musical strategies of the copying process such as repetition, inversion, retrogression, expansion, reduction, and mixing are transferred to the realm of visual art in this exhibition.
If the music of ‘canon’ consists of the liberating space between making a rule and escaping from it, the musical attitude specific to the canon could be applied to every moment of the life. Through plastic variations on geometric themes that has been already produced in the realm of music, Hong would give us a ‘space of frozen music,’ which could be called a ‘space of freedom.’

The works presented in this show- the large wall painting with rhythmically arranged sticky labels, the printed matter showing visual analysis on the pitch and volume of sounds, the three dimensional work on speed, and so on- suggest new ‘organic’ aspects of the ‘pixel abstract’ that Hong has worked for the last ten years. ‘Organic geometry’ is literally a live and proliferating geometry of numerous cells that keep metrical repetition and mutation for good. The images ceaselessly related to one another are connected to a musical inspiration so as to offer a new musical score open to free interpretation. 
Installation View of Volume-up