Welcome to the dreamy and colorful world of Korean fine artist Hong Ji-Yoon 홍지윤 and her 2010 collection “Life is Colorful”!  Hong Ji-Yoon is a successful fine artist from Korea who mainly works on a very large scale with traditional mediums, graduating with her BFA and MFA in Oriental Fine Art from Hongik University in 1994. She has gone on to have shows throughout Korea, China, and Germany and in 2011 teamed up with the brand Basic House to launch shirt designs featuring her work.

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Her work is a beautiful combination of traditional Asian brush stroke techniques and aesthetic, but splashed with modern and very saturated colors. The art swims around the page like an explosion of elegant doodles with floral patterns, natural curving female shapes, and soft movement throughout the piece like it is taking you into a warm rainbow embrace.  As soon as I saw these pieces I immediately fell in love.

  Korean fine art today is still very much a balance of organic + natural which is in tune with the tastes of the Korean People, but Ji-Yoon’s work is such a playful and beautiful twist (yet so distinctly Korean) that I absolutely fell in love with her pieces!

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According to her Korean interviews online, the writings and the colors she use reflect her point of view of life and her philosophy in life. She often portrays flowers that look like they’re expanding and blooming, which portray her desire a sense of exploration & adventure with a sense of nostalgia to times past. She interprets this mixed sense of nostalgia and the present day by combining Asian traditional calligraphy with a modern tone and drawing methods.

Her feelings expressed in her work currently have a lot to do with her age and now that change is affecting her. She states that since she is in her 40s, her work often reflects her revisiting urges of wanting to be in love and wanting to have fairytale-like adventures that she was able to in the past since your 40s is the age where you don’t quite feel like you have that sense of reflection and analysis of life that old age brings, and you’re often visited by the young feelings which you can’t have anymore.

My pieces are poems. I often portray nature and use calligraphy methods to do so. My poems are about the incidents we face in our daily lives and our reflections towards these life events. I’m very free in terms of how I use mediums for a piece. I use performances, interpret dances, projectors, paintings, light boxes, photography, movies, anything i feel like to interpret these poems. I hope that my colorful pieces would touch peoples hearts and smear some of its colors to them in their liking.

-Hong Ji Yoon 홍지윤

(translated from dkbnews interview) 

Her ideas for the poems is that the girl in the paintings sings a love song, and the song becomes a part of her drawing and the drawing with the song becomes the painting of her love ♥

 

As an artist I borrow the most familiar form proving that all is evidently one through illusion. Cloud becomes flower, flower becomes bird, bird becomes human, human becomes love, love becomes dream.  It is called dreaming, chasing a dream within a dream.

-홍지윤

Visit her site for show dates and information at www.hongjiyoon.com

Images are all © to the artist or their respective owners/creators