Art salon de H
홍일화 Hong Il hwa
《별의 동화 La Fable des Étoiles》
2026. 1. 6 – 2. 14
Sunlight's writing
Hong Il-hwa has long grounded his artistic practice in a fundamental inquiry into the nature of the “human” being. Over the course of nearly twenty years of figurative work developed in France, he has explored the instability of identity through the face—the most social of surfaces.
In an era where faces are endlessly transformed 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 manifests 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 is visualized through the motif of the “mask.
Moving beyond the inner realm of the human, his work expands toward a more fundamental environment that surrounds humanity. At the end of this trajectory lies the space the artist ultimately reaches: nature—the forest—resembling freedom itself. Traveling between Jeju and Europe, Hong Il-hwa has immersed himself in forests, steadily capturing the light and breath inherent in nature on the canvas, a practice that has resonated with many viewers. By continually questioning the boundaries between nature and humanity, inside and outside, the real and the artificial, he uses the forest to reveal sensations of ecology and life, alongside issues of identity and the multilayered self.
In the newly exhibited figurative works, scenes appear in which figures and birds exchange gazes. This quiet moment, where two different worlds face one another, symbolically depicts the reconnection between nature and humanity. The artist describes this not as fantasy or imagination, but as a process of reviving forgotten memories and awakening the primal senses that have long lain dormant within us.
Interface1208, Oil on canvas, 100x100cm, 2025
Hong Il-hwa’s forest is not a representation of nature, but a sensory space poised at the boundary between reality and unreality. Within it flows a time that belongs nowhere, and a nameless breath is born. Beneath leaves where light and shadow intersect, the human being once again takes its place as a presence that breathes together with nature.
