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.