Hong Seung-Hye:
The Painter's Architecture, The Painter's Furniture
Hong Seung-Hye, Artist’s Architecture, Artist’s Furniture, 2025, Space ZeroOne Mezzanine Lounge, New York (Made in Studio GAGAGUZOOK Seoul, 2025). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Charlie Rubin.
For Hong Seung-Hye, art is inseparable from life. She seeks to create objects that neither weigh too heavily nor disrupt reality. Beginning with painting and drawing, her practice has evolved through the pixels and vectors of the digital realm—beyond painting, sculpture, and relief—into installation, video, performance, architecture, and furniture. Her Mezzanine Lounge project The Painter’s Architecture, The Painter’s Furniture (2025) extends her recent interest in art that can be used, touched, and inhabited into a spatial experience. Emerging from urban life, digital language, and the tradition of utilitarian art, her works transform geometric abstraction into a lived, functional environment that invites visitors to share in her artistic vision.
Artist’s Note
The lounge’s furniture—created from flat, painterly color planes assembled in various configurations—alongside the architectural elements, including decorative carpets and glass murals, reflects the sensibilities and compositional language of a designer with a painter’sbackground. Russian Constructivists such as Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, who began their careers as painters, advocated for the social utility of art and produced functional objects. Donald Judd’s transition from abstract painting to furniture design follows a similar trajectory. I believe that the social practice of abstract art, particularly geometric abstraction, finds its expression through architecture and design.
Soft, plush sofas allow us to “rest,” while firm chairs and benches encourage upright posture and invite “reflection”—a principle that can be observed in the wooden benches of churches and cathedrals. The social utility of art remains an eternal challenge for artists. Just as churches and cathedrals are open to all who share a common faith, I hope that this lounge will serve as a spiritual space for those who share a belief in the value of art. (November 2024)
