​홍일화 Hong Il Wha "별의 동화 La fable des etoiles"

Hong Il-hwa has long begun his artistic practice with a fundamental question about the nature of the “human” being.

In a series of figurative works developed over nearly twenty years in France, he has explored the instability of identity through the face—the most social of surfaces. In an era where faces are endlessly altered through makeup and adornment, disguise and cosmetic surgery, and where even names and nationalities are fluid, the question “What is the true self?” has remained a persistent theme in his work. This inquiry revealed itself as the gap between the self that exists in the gaze of others and the self perceived from within, and on the canvas, this tension was visualized through the motif of the “mask.”