Don't Call It Women's Art

My first response to Seonna Hong’s illustrative paintings was an instant and almost instinctual revulsion. The four paintings on the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Web site, previewing her exhibit there, featured cute little girls in fluffy dresses cavorting with flowers, deer, birds, raccoons, and—horror of horrors—frolicking bunnies in story-book settings. There was an unsettling anime influence mixed with Dick-and-Jane book cover imagery. It all seemed trite and decorative, the worst kind stereotypically female work. How could a young female artist so blatantly embody and endorse the kind of imagery that women have historically been limited to, rather than explore all the avenues that have opened for women artists in the last 100 years?

When I finally saw the full exhibition, though, I realized there was more going on in Hong’s work. “People in the City” and “Animus,” Hong’s series of paintings portray children in classic mid-20th-century book illustration style as a conduit for conveying broader human themes of alienation, rejection, and even violence. Hong uses the childlike imagery to render unmediated emotions and experience. Juxtaposing idealized imagery of innocence with the harder facts of real life is a central theme of her work.

As a mother with a young child, Hong found children’s books with happy endings and pat solutions to complex problems annoying. She wanted to portray situations in which things don’t always work out. Her paintings are fairly autobiographical in nature—she considers them a kind of journal. She draws not just from her own experiences as a child and as a mother watching her child, but also from her mother’s history.

Her mother, who was born and raised in Korea, was still very young when she became engaged over the phone to a Korean-American architect. She had watched a lot of Hollywood movies in her native Korea, so she thought Americans dressed like she had seen in films. When it came time for her wedding in California, she packed only party dresses. Hong’s painting “American Movies” depicts her mother’s suitcase spilling its contents onto the airport runway, preserving that amusing and somewhat embarrassing experience.

Hong is also an award-winning animator, having received an Emmy for her design work on My Life as a Teenage Robot, produced for Nickelodeon. Her paintings are mainly done with a type of paint, called cell vinyl, that sticks to just about any surface. It dries to an opaque, matte surface and is used in the animation industry for direct application onto film.

Her flat, empty urban landscapes are drawn from a love of Edward Hopper cityscapes. The highway overpasses and flat cement foreground of “Head On” demonstrate this influence, with two of her archetypical little girls, decked out in little dresses and mary janes, engaging in a hair-pulling fistfight. (When pressed, Hong readily admits to have participated in a number of girl fights herself as a child.)

Packaging and commercial design profoundly influence the technical construction of her work: A simple trip through the grocery store will find her developing ideas to use in upcoming pieces. Her love of experimentation with the materials she uses in her work extends to the use of the natural grain found in her plywood panels as major composition elements. In “Adrift” and “Unnie,” the waving wood grain effortlessly becomes the waves of the water that the girls both float and wade through.

She’s planning to use embroidery as a new element in future mixed-media pieces.

SubUrban: Seonna Hong
Knoxville Museum of Art (1050 World’s Fair Park) / Through March 11 / $5