Heo Eun-young 허은영
Eun Young Heo was born in 1962 in Seoul, Korea and is currently living in Seoul. She started working professionally after graduating from the painting department at Hongik University.
From 2001 to 2006, she explored the themes of spirituality in life beyond pain through the ecological depictions of seeds, their shapes, and their progress in nature. It was announced under the themes of 'Mediation of a Seed' and 'Space Waiting,' which were semi-abstract paintings using natural properties found in Korean traditional paper, also referred to as Hanji. She continued using Hanji, but starting from 2007, she started incorporating it with box work as means of internal healing, which later led to a series of works titled 'From Inner Space'. This title comes from the shape of bottles and cups. This has become the main motif in her most recent works, projecting the internal and external relationships of objects to human beings, symbolizing concepts such as filling and emptiness.
Around the time of participating in a contemporary art exhibition located in Sarajevo in 2014, she began to engage in various layers of social art activities toward specific contemporary issues in our society. Her experimental nature by using various media, while incorporating traditional painting techniques in an installation using space-specific spaces serves as a complementary tool toward the escalation and expansion of these topics. This was also shown in various exhibitions held in redevelopment areas and old animal laboratories. The main themes of these exhibits were focus on the dignity of life made helpless by global capitalism as viewed from a relational perspective.
Eun Young Heo has continued exploring other contemporary issues as well. In the group exhibition in 2017 by Art ZeAn called “Re-Encountering Her”, she touched the topic of endless wars and human rights abuses. Her piece "From Memories" used historical facts in to emphasize this concern.
Heo has participated in 18 individual exhibitions and dozens of international exhibitions, including showing in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, China and Hong Kong. She is currently working with the Art ZeAn group, while leading an international exchange research project and overseas exhibition project held at the Hague Quartair between 2017 and 2018.
2010 - present
2010 - present
In Between
color print & drawing on transparency film, 300 x 192cm, 2018
My encounters with these women started by browsing through evidential records and information. I chose to only focus on faces captured in certain moments while acknowledging inevitable bias, inherent in the act of imagination. By doing this, they are carefully manifested as a novel image. Facing them outside the context of the circumstances, we navigate through between the parallel lines, grappling with the gravitation the two different approaches have towards one another.
With modern networks in the digital age, these women are now able to testify to unfinished wars and violence against women. They meet people through a number of uploads/downloads on online platforms and electronic mediums. Traces of their lives with their testimonies continue through technology. Therefore, room for encounters are left somewhere in the virtual space: so they live on.
Images provided by Seoul National University Human Rights Center, War & Women’s Human Rights Museum, etc.