Remembered Landscapes between Berlin and Busan
August – September 2023
Yerin Hong offers a spontaneous response to urban spaces in her paintings. After ten years in Berlin, she returned to Busan, Korea. From fleeting moments and street scenes in the two cities, she creates a visual dialogue between Berlin and Busan. Her works were already shown in 2023 as part of the exhibition “Ari-Arirang” at the Humboldt Forum and generated multi-layered feedback between Germany and Korea.
“My paintings seem to emerge from disorder and a lack of direction, but each picture becomes the driving force for the next. They stand separately yet in dialogue with each other and share a common understanding. The exhibition “Ari-Arirang” showed me the great potential of bringing together works from different contexts and times in one place: they begin to talk to each other and exchange new stories. I learned from this experience that not only inner impulses but also a wide variety of encounters may provide decisive impetus in my painting. They prevent my pictures from remaining isolated.”
— Yerin Hong
Yerin Hong is a painter, art space operator, and lecturer in painting. After studying Painting at Hongik University in Seoul, she graduated in Art History and Theatre Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin. Her time in Germany has shaped her artistic practice, addressing issues of familiarity in the unfamiliar and the overlapping of place and memory. Yerin Hong works in oil, acrylic, and drawing. Today, she manages the “Bilderkammer” art space in Busan, where she teaches and develops collaborative projects that make art tangible as a social medium.