I had never seen Eunnam Hong’s art before walking into “Souvenirs,” her New York solo debut at Lubov. Something about it seemed strangely familiar—or rather, familiarly strange. Yet in a minute I clocked it: Her canvases possess an atmosphere reminiscent of certain works by women Surrealists of the mid-twentieth century. In particular, I thought of that marvelous painting in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday, 1942. The reason it took me a moment to realize this was that Hong has deducted from her pictures the whole fantastical stockpile of overtly bizarre Surrealist imagery: From Birthday, for instance, the weird little winged monster that accompanies Tanning’s dominating self-portrait, and the astonishing outfit—quasi-Elizabethan and partly composed of what appears to be living greenery—in which she is decked out.
What Hong has retained, aside from the accent on costume, is the kind of space in which Tanning placed herself, a fully enclosed and somehow uncanny domestic interior with no windows opening to the outside. But Hong has also adapted from the late painter a certain manner of portraying that environment: plain, factual, chromatically muted—a subdued literalism meant to heighten the picture’s strangeness by lending it verisimilitude. Hong has further followed Tanning by basing her paintings on self-portraiture—or at least we have to accept the gallery’s word on it, for we see in Hong’s paintings little of the face, as it is frequently obscured by big eyeglasses and the tresses of curly wigs, worn by the woman she depicts over and over again. Nor, I should say, does Hong’s subject proudly bare her breasts as Tanning did; the recurring figure is demurely covered up by her voguish clothing.
Another element Hong has taken from Tanning, but in a remarkably transmuted way, is repetition. In Tanning’s art, we see doorway after doorway after doorway, like mirrors mirroring other mirrors, leading to an endless number of rooms that might, after all, be the same room, an infinitude that becomes a labyrinthine enclosure. With Hong, the recurring motif is her self-portrait, a nearly anonymous or incognito figure despite our being told it represents the artist—but then we have to ask, Who is she?
Hong’s multiplicity is a show of force: The artist outnumbers the viewer. Her proliferating avatars hang around their sparsely furnished rooms like fashion models—lanky, rail thin, elegantly posed, and expressionless, according to what little we see of their faces. More than a person, she is a platoon, appearing five times (with take-out coffee cups and a bagged sandwich) in Lunch Break, 2023, or as chic twins in Women in Blonde Wigs, 2022. Is she one or two in White Collar, 2023, meaning, is this a picture of her lying down on a bed facing her doppelgänger, or is she simply admiring her own reflection in a mirror? Given the serial nature of this group of ten paintings, even the solitary figure of Myth, 2023, seems incipiently numerous.
Hong’s ambiguous meditations on identity are fascinating, but what carries the work is the refinement of her self-effacing facture. I found myself getting pleasurably lost in the folds of the snowy shirt and bedsheet in White Collar, and fascinated, in Japanese Teapot, 2022, by the almost unnoticeable reflection of the surrounding room in the titular vessel, on which the composition centers. Just as the artist obliquely displays herself as quasi anonymous, she shows her virtuosity by underplaying it.
— Barry Schwabsky
