The Echoes of Forgotten Nights

Sunyoung Hwang was the winner of the 2016-17 Chadwell Award. The prize includes a studio space for a year with Bow Arts and Hwang will present her end of award exhibition The Echoes of Forgotten Nights at the Nunnery Gallery.
Hwang’s work explores the realms of the intangible, such as absence, emptiness, and silence. It is a hidden presence, an invisible fullness, and an empty but intense moment that are implicit in, or exist beneath or between the layers of what is perceptible. To reach these intangibles, her work has a sensation that can be perceived in silent contemplation in terms of its ambiguous sense of time and place. In this sense, she describes her work as a place in which the invisible can be seen, the impalpable can be touched, and silence can be heard: it is an internal experience, which is absolutely psychological and personal, of sensing and perceiving the intangible. Hwang has developed a way of working which uses the stream-of-consciousness technique to visualise it. She works directly onto the canvas without reference to preliminary sketches, drawings, or photographs, and therefore, the entire process of her work happens only on the canvas. She associatively overlaps multiple layers of paints with different colours, shapes, or brush strokes by responding to the preceding layers and letting one layer lead to another. Having its own temporality and spatiality, each and every layer is itself a complete scene of the metaphorically internalised abstraction drawn from her physical, sensory, emotional, and psychological experiences. Thus, within the canvas as the painting progresses, her act of painting is an organic process, of accumulating different scenes with different speeds and tempos, time and movements, gestures and brush strokes, temperatures and emotions.
Private View: 6:30 – 8:30 pm

 
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sunyoung Hwang (b. 1988, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in London. She received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2016. Prior to this she completed a BFA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in 2012. Hwang has had solo exhibitions in the UK and South Korea and participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world. Previous solo exhibitions are: With Half-Closed Eyes, Galerie ERD, Seoul, 2017; Liminal Moment, Project Gallery, Arundel, 2016. Recent group exhibitions include: Fresh Paint, Messums Wiltshire, Salisbury, 2018; Lost in the Woods, The Square Gallery London, London, 2016; Rén (L’Homme), Centre Artasia Paris, Paris, 2016; Bath Open Art Prize 2016, 44AD Artspace, Bath, 2016; Opia, SÍM Gallery, Reykjavík, 2016. Hwang was the recipient of the Chadwell Award 2016-17 and the third prize winner of the Bath Open Art Prize 2016. She was previously the recipient of the Steer Memorial Prize 2011 for outstanding performances in painting when she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.