Southern California multimedia artist Soon J Hwang

Soon J Hwang started drawing as soon as she could hold a pencil still a toddler. While in and of itself not extraordinary this precocious child made a life around artistic statement of a highly personal order. Growing up in Korea through no less than two wars and the hardships that they brought, she eventually went on to study western painting at EHWA University in Seoul graduating in 1959, the top women’s college in the ever evolving, war torn country. Then after relocation to the United States she continued to develop her craft, including post grad work at U Maryland, and explored new mediums with a restlessness that set the tone for decades to come.

Through merger of image past and present she fabricates a collective tapestry of emotion, whimsy, observation, contrast and dimensionality into a living diaspora of holographic imprints resonant with the frequency of human experience and earthly rhythms. Constant exploration of oscillating forms and subject matter cast her the mercurial creature to a fault. Categorization is problematic yet, though a coherent thematic thread may be at times challenging to parse out, the life of the artist is after all evolution just as is the crises of her native home land. Perhaps the lesson is like the iron filings drawn to the magnet that create a multifaceted pallet or maybe the pallet creates the magnet.

Whether doing abstract painting, realistic landscape and portrait, digital art, hybrid media, lithograph, linocut, paper weaving, etching, monotype, pencil sketch or pastels, when it comes to 2D art SJH does a bit of everything in her unique, fluid style. She is also a published author with a book of essays in her native Korean language.

*Note that the artist works in many sizes and mediums. Sizes seen on this site are often not at proportional scale from image to image