Young In Hong (b. 1972), through her diverse artistic practices, has consistently explored the theme of "equality," working to flexibly dismantle various hierarchical structures in reality. The artist has persistently pursued works across a range of media—including drawing, painting, installation, sound, embroidery, performance, and text—seeking to investigate the "boundary" as a place where equality can be tested.

Young In Hong’s early works possess a temporary and theatrical nature based on specific locations. For example, The Pillars (2002) involved the installation of curtain-like pillars within an exhibition space.

These curtain pillars, meticulously hand-sewn by the artist, are hollow, thereby diminishing the functional role of traditional pillars that bear the weight of a structure. As secondary decorative structures, they occupy and block the interior space, disrupting the existing spatial context of the gallery.

In 2004, Hong presented a series of public art projects through the exhibition “Open Theater,” which she curated herself. Using Factory Gallery as her base, the artist created installation works at nearby locations such as a post office and a police station. These works were designed as interventions to temporarily introduce art into the authoritative and restrictive context of public institutions, challenging preconceived notions through various mechanisms.
 
The work Open Theater (2004), which utilized the post office building in Anguk-dong, showcased a theatrical character by making the exterior appear as though construction to raise the roof was underway. Hong installed scaffolding structures and draped red fabric resembling stage curtains around the building, transforming the post office into a stage for a fictional construction project. By recontextualizing a public, non-artistic space, the artist blurred the boundaries between art and everyday life.

Another project, I Will Commit Crime Forever and a Day (2004), used a police station in Samcheong-dong as its stage. The work began with the artist wandering the streets of Seoul, randomly uprooting flowers from flower beds or taking potted plants from public spaces without discretion. The stolen flowers were then documented through embroidery, with the resulting pieces used to decorate the interior of the police station.

In this way, I Will Commit Crime Forever and a Day presented itself as a flat, embroidered artwork, while simultaneously existing as a kind of theatrical/performance act of flower theft. This work, rooted in the act of committing a minor crime, created a paradoxical situation within the police station—a space dedicated to upholding public safety.
 
Art, placed within the "protective shield" of maintaining safety, becomes safe despite revealing the commission of minor crimes. In this context, the police station transforms into a small art gallery, open to the public 24 hours a day.

Through site-specific installations and theatrical staging, Young In Hong has engaged anonymous members of the public, creating works that challenge the boundaries of art and disrupt our perceptions. Alongside these theatrical and performance-oriented projects, another significant aspect of her artistic practice involves the use of sewing and embroidery.
 
By employing sewing—a low-wage labor historically associated with Asian female workers—and embroidery, a craft traditionally excluded from the realm of fine art, Hong’s work draws attention to marginalized individuals within grand narratives. For instance, her embroidered piece Under the Sky of Happiness (2013), inspired by the poster of the film Heaven and Earth of Sakhalin (1964), features portraits of prominent women and laborers from Korea’s modernization era.

In this work, images of women from different generations, various social classes, and diverse professional fields are reassembled using a photomontage technique in embroidery. Through this process, Hong revisits and reconstructs the history of women's labor, which had been undervalued and inadequately recognized within a male-dominated society. By employing sewing—a practice often dismissed as low-wage labor—Hong brings renewed attention to and reinterprets the overlooked contributions of women in history.

Young In Hong’s work, which re-inscribes the existence of marginalized individuals through embroidery, evolved into a musical score form with Looking Down from the Sky (2017). The artist collected archival photographs from Korea’s social movements and drew outlines of silhouettes from these images, including protest banners, groups of people raising their voices together, and police attempting to suppress them. These drawings were then transformed into embroidery.
 
Hong reinterpreted the shapes of these embroidered works into musical scores, allowing the voices of the oppressed and marginalized to resonate once more, this time as melodies played on instruments such as the piano, violin, and trumpet.

In 2019, Young In Hong participated in the “Korea Artist Prize” exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, where she explored themes of nationalism and social inequality that have become increasingly magnified worldwide. Reflecting on the pervasive exclusivity in our global society, Hong emphasized the urgent need for alternative ways of communication. She approached this idea through animals, focusing on their fundamentally different ways of interaction compared to humans.
 
Centered on birds, her work To Paint the Portrait of a Bird (2019) combined large-scale spatial installations resembling birdcages, video, sound, and embroidery. The piece created a paradoxical situation by inviting viewers to enter the oversized birdcage, thus reversing the roles of bird and human.

The viewer is then confronted with an embroidered hanging piece inspired by Gammo Yeojaedo (感慕如在圖), a painting depicting a sacred space where ancestral spirits are honored in traditional Confucian rites. Drawing from the iconography of this work, Hong replaced the images of ancestral shrines and ritual tools with representations of birds.
 
This series of works subverts the hierarchy between humans and animals, offering a reimagined relationship between the two. In her video piece The White Mask (2019), the artist further explored this theme by performing an improvised musical composition that embodied a "becoming animals" for humans, searching for the intersection between human and animal existence.

Hong views exclusivity and extreme othering as pathological symptoms potentially embedded within society. Through her performance work Un-Splitting (2019), which involves the participation of various individuals, she sought to dissolve these divisions and challenge societal fragmentation.
 
To create this piece, Hong first investigated historical archives reflecting issues such as low-wage industrial labor by women, unpaid domestic work, and the societal convention that has historically regarded young women as apolitical subjects. She then identified specific movements of female factory workers in the photographs and intersected them with the erratic movements of birds. This led to the creation of a unique choreography that juxtaposed human and animal-like gestures.

Through non-human beings, the artist's reflections on human society continue in Thi and Anjan (2021). One day, the artist realized that the concept of a "community," where animals, humans, plants, and all living beings are interconnected and coexist, has been gradually lost. This realization led her to focus on animal communities that live in groups and communicate emotionally with each other.
 
Among such animal communities, the artist focused on elephants. She observed the lives and communication patterns of elephants living in a community at Chester Zoo in the UK and collected their sounds. She then collaborated with straw craft masters to create straw sandals for the grandmother elephant, "Thi," and her granddaughter, "Anjan," who lived and passed away in the community.
 
Along with the straw sandals made for the elephants, Hong created a soundtrack that evokes various places and situations where humans and elephants encounter, such as forests in Africa, Indian weddings, and zoos. By creating this audiovisual environment, the artist allows viewers to sense and imagine a space-time where humans and animals coexist and communicate.

Young In Hong pays careful and respectful attention to the disappearing spaces or marginalized voices under the pressure of metanarratives through her flexible methodology of art, while integrating them into an exhibition like weaving weft and warp, thereby inviting us to that horizontal community.

”I am interested in the notion of boundary; boundary as the place where ‘equality’ can be practised, re-distributed and tested in my work. For me, equality is not about A equals B, but rather more about expanding the perceptual space between A and B, which allows us to explore the relation between the two.

Staging a careful set boundary between art and social spaces has been a theme recurring in different forms in my practices for a long time. The intention is to slightly shift or obscure already familiar and accepted social norms through this setting where questions are proposed rather than fixed terms suggested.” (Young In Hong, Artist Note)

Young In Hong, who is currently based in Bristol, England, received a BA and MA from Seoul National University and an MA and a PhD from Goldsmiths College in London. She has presented a number of solo exhibitions and projects in Europe and Asia, including ICA London, Korean Cultural Centre in the UK, Art Sonje Center, Art Club 1563, and Alternative Space LOOP.
 
Her performances have taken place in globally recognized performance spaces including Block Universe in London, Arnolfini in Bristol, and Turner Contemporary in Margate. Further, her works have been showcased in group exhibitions at top-tier art institutions including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, and Asia Culture Center, as well as international art events including the Gwangju Bienniale and La Triennale di Milano.
 
In 2019, Hong was shortlisted for the Korea Artist Prize at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and received the Kimsechoong Art Prize in 2011 and the Suk-Nam Art Prize in 2003. She is currently a Reader at the Bath School of Art, UK.

References

• 홍영인, Young In Hong (Artist Website) 
• PKM 갤러리, 홍영인 (PKM Gallery, Young In Hong)
• 올해의 작가상, 홍영인 (Korea Artist Prize, Young In Hong)
• 갤러리 팩토리, 홍영인 – 하늘 공연장 (Gallery Factory, Young In Hong – Open Theater)
• 서울시립미술관, SeMA 옴니버스 “끝없이 갈라지는 세계의 끝에서” (Seoul Museum of Art, SeMA Omnibus “At the End of the World Split Endlessly”)
• 국립현대미술관, 홍영인 | 새의 초상을 그리려면 - Ⅳ. 벽그림 | 2019 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), HONG Youngin | To Paint the Portrait of a Bird - Ⅳ.Wall Tapestry | 2019)
• 국립현대미술관, 홍영인 | 비-분열증 | 2019 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), HONG Youngin | Un-Splitting | 2019)
• PKM 갤러리, 홍영인: We Where (PKM Gallery, Young In Hong: We Where)