NYAB Event - Seonna Hong “If You Lived Here I’d Be Home by Now”

Seonna Hong “If You Lived Here I’d Be Home by Now”

Jonathan LeVine Gallery

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Jonathan LeVine Gallery presents If You Lived Here I’d Be Home By Now, a series of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Seonna Hong in what will be her debut solo exhibition at the gallery. After completing a series of self-reflective work throughout her career, Hong has discovered a way to look forward in this collection of paintings that signify her return to the New York Art world after eight years.

Hong is a multi-disciplinary talent with international recognition as a painter, illustrator and animation production artist. Notable accolades include an Emmy Award, a critically acclaimed picture book and in 2008 she was chosen by Takashi Murakami as the first American to have a solo exhibition at the world renowned KaiKai Kiki gallery in Japan.

Where Hong’s previous works focused on reckoning, forgiveness and ‘wishing I said all the things I didn’t say,’ If You Lived Here I’d Be Home by Now explores the possibilities of what’s to come. In the artist’s words, “My once melancholic and somber pieces have given way to a new kind of hopefulness.”

Continuing to move away from compositions of fully formed ideas, Hong’s process is spontaneous yet deliberate. Using paint swirls and scrapes to define space and texture her signature characterization of girls and animals remains, but they exist less as protagonists and more as a lens to view the expressionistic landscapes they occupy. In If You Lived Here I’d Be Home by Now the artist works with a visual and literal vocabulary that takes cues from her personal life. By incorporating text and using books as her canvas for a selection of works, Hong examines the universal themes of exploration and reconnecting with our sense of childlike wonder.

Seonna Hong was born in Southern California in 1973 and graduated with a B.A. in Art from Cal State University Long Beach. She honed her craft teaching art to children and in in 2004 received an Emmy Award for Individual Achievement in Production Design for her work on the animated series, My Life as a Teenage Robot. That same year she released Animus, a moving picture book published by Baby Tattoo Books. Hong has exhibited at galleries around the world, most notably with Kaikai Kiki under the direction of Takashi Murakami in Tokyo, Japan.