Jung-Ouk Hong’s sculptures explore the extent to which our imaginations can be colonised by external order. His sculptures look like creatures from the unknown which suddenly find themselves in a new, alien environment. Their shapes are reminiscent of insects and bugs, with unusual antennae that probe the unknown space around them; but these insects are somehow more machine than organic, like animals drawn from the depths of our imagination and then technologically reconfigured. We are as alien to them as they are unsettling to us – life-forms so adapted by engineering that we share not even the same parameters of perception or experience. His sculptures articulate the uncomfortable reality of how alien the rational becomes on its furthest fringes. Jung-Ouk Hong graduated with an MFA from the Slade in 2009, and has exhibited widely both in the Europe and Korea, including Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2009 and the Guasch Coranty International Painting Prize in Barcelona (2010).
