Nam Hong was born and raised in Korea and moved to France many years ago where she has since lived. Her art comes from the ideas of suffering and nurturing and embraces both the cycles of life and death, through some sort of unending collision between passion and decay, fire and ashes, combining Korean shamanic traditions with contemporary Western issues.
She makes no distinction or hierarchy between the different art forms but uses all means of expression: paint, design, performance: she believes that her canvas or performances are the only true theater of existence, while life seems just a dream. Her current ink and acrylic paintings from 2013 onwards have a spontaneous, lyrical gesture to them and are inspired by the majesty of Asian calligraphy. Acrylic allows for a certain velocity of execution. Then she adds glue and burned pieces of paper on the canvas. The images of butterflies, candlelight and paper fragments reduced to ashes such as in Le printemps, reveal the mysterious cycle of life and death, the origins of existence that eventually lead to extinction.
