Burning Love

2014

Young In Hong
The work of Young In Hong encompasses drawing, textiles, sound installation and performance. She aims to investigate the processes and ideas around authorship, translation and reinterpretation. Hong’s large-scale embroidered textile works are often based on photographs and archival imagery, including moments of collective experiences such as protests and demonstrations in recent Korean history. They also allude to the politics and economics of the global textiles industry. Burning Love, 2014 illustrates a scene from a candle-lit vigil that was held in Seoul, South Korea in 2008. The demonstration was triggered by the Korean government’s reversal of a ban on US beef imports and saw thousands of people take to the streets to join the protest, making it one of the most important democratic events in Korea’s modern history. However, very little was done to document this by mainstream media. Composed using viscose rayon threads and cotton, the meticulously embroidered image in oversaturated blue, orange, yellow and red portrays the crowd, each person marked by a dot of light. Through her painstaking method, Young In Hong encapsulates this under-reported event in a way which is poetic and poignant. Burning Love was commissioned for the exhibition Spectrum Spectrum by PLATEAU museum, Seoul, 2014.
  • Artwork Details: 290 x 370cm
  • Edition:
  • Material description: Viscose rayon thread, cotton
  • Credit line: © the artist
  • Theme: Undefined
  • Medium: Textile
  • Accession number: ACC36/2018

Explore this Artwork

In this episode of the Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange podcast Art Pod, artists Young In Hong and Michelle Williams Gamaker are in conversation about their artistic practices and respective works in Newlyn Art Gallery’s 2020 exhibition Go On Being So. The work was selected from the Arts Council Collection by The MBA Collective, a group of art, photography and graphics students from Mounts Bay Academy.

 

In addition, two members of the MBA Collective, Florence Silby and Josie Miles, conducted Q&A interviews with Young In Hong and Michelle Williams Gamaker respectively. You can read their responses here:

 

Q&A: Florence Silby with Young In Hong Q&A: Josie Miles & Michelle Williams Gamaker

About the Artist

From the Q&A with Go On Being So curator Florence Silby and exhibiting artist Young In Hong

 

FH: Have you always been interested in producing political art, or was there a specfic event that sparked your interest?

 

YIH: I don't consider my work to be 'political art', but I am interested in how art can have a political role. I'm interested in revisiting specific historical moments in South Korea and reinterpreting them through means that are more familiar to the younger generations, such as social media, flash mobs, etc. I'm particularly interested in doing this from a female perspective, from the position that South Korean history has evolved under authoritative male-dominated regimes until very recently.

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