FREE EXPRESSION is the essence of creation and the overwhelming desire of artists.  Through intelligence it produces abstraction in art, searching for an ultimate freedom or vision while dreaming about an ideal world or utopia.  On the other hand, when freedom of expression allies with emotion, artists generate expressionism in a fit of emotion transcending walls and barriers of reality. 

Sunny Hong’s paintings flash strong colors over canvas, churning emotional tides and whirling free winds.  Shedding away traditional molds of formality and ignoring capricious popular arts, she only relies on her own will dictated by the sizzling emotion in her bosom.  In this spirit she faces people and the world and challenges Mother Nature and the Universe by creating her art that is genuinely pure and free.  In doing this she penetrates the hearts of the connoisseur. 

Sunny Hong’s way of artistic expression is uniquely individual.  It may be caused by her prolonged stay in America, experiencing a wider and deeper life.  Her canvas is overflowing with colors that freely intermingle, casually intertwining and smoothly untangling by means of virtuoso brush strokes. 

Of recent, Sunny Hong’s paintings exhibit a gradual progress in which her color-intensiveness yields to color-sparing where pictures turn increasingly brighter and fairer.  Thus her art has reached an important and critical stage where colors are delicate rather than intensive and they are mellowed in a loving tone rather than making noisy calls of huckstery or haberdashery. 

Sunny Hong’s SEOUL EXHIBITION 1986 is a clear reminder of her authenticity in ABSTRACT-EXPRESSIONISM that had swept the art world in the 1950’s. I feel so glad and happy to view her masterpieces as though I have met an old friend. 

Liew Kenjun

Professor - Art School

Seoul National University

Seoul, Korea

Light was the initial creation of God, the colors being its attribute.  Painters express themselves in colors on canvas much like the Creator generates things in the Universe.  The impressionists devoted themselves to catching colors being transformed from the light.  This trend has been intensified by abstractionists and their followers. 

Sunny Hong Kim’s canvas discharges intensively brilliant colors yielding gorgeous yet intellectual illusions.  From her casual brush, vivid primary colors stream like volcanic lava, some drying up spontaneously in the way only to resume a smooth flow by a brush dipped into  fresh paint.  The tempo of her brush strokes is rather fast moving freely on the canvas like angles dancing to the heavenly tunes. 

Staring at her paintings, my emotion experiences a mystic life that is free, spontaneous, giddy yet pleasant.  But the temporal effect of paintings is not the only art she is creating.  THe occasional heavy staggering brush strokes with solid paints can yield a concrete spatial effect on the canvas.  Here, she uses her paints not for drawing points or lines but rather as materials for filling up the space caught by her artistic spontaneity and intuition.  Thus, Sunny Hong Kim’s art works are masterpieces of the action-charged temporal paintings as well as sedate spatial ones. 

The painter deliberately uses strong and various primary colors that reflect her keen sense of them.  She perceives colors psychologically rather than physically with her paintings invoking inspirational empathy in the hearts of viewers.  Sunny Hong Kim creates her arts borrowing the light of God-Creation and returns it back to God with cornucopia of bonus paintings that brings joy and happiness to people of the world. 

I would not appreciate Sunny Hong Kim’s paintings as products of an Abstractionist-Expressionist; rather I would view them as dramas she plays on a colorful stage under the shower of divine light. 

Park Yongsook

There’s a new artist in town. It’s Sunny Kim who has had her first show in Laguna Beach at the Sandstone Gallery. The Korean-born artist calls the exhibition “Cosmic Dreams” as she is drawn to images of the vast universe, the heavens and the meaning of what lies in the spiritual realm beyond the physical world we can see. Kim exhibits six paintings that seem at first abstract. But because they are of cosmic formations, each canvas is really about symbolic movements and colors of heavenly bodies and their celestial patterns in opposition - a state of chaos and a state of order.

    Kim never remembers not making art. Her father, a dentist by profession, was an artist and won national recognition in Korea. Because of her artistic abilities, Kim did not have to take an entrance examination upon entering high school or Seoul National University.

  She quickly became known for her art. Although her classes, in Korea and later at the prestigious Parsons School of Design in New York City, required her to create all types of art, Kim’s focus was always to explore the universe through art media. With colors, patterns and artistic expressions of space, the artist’s heart is in how an artist can express infinity on a finite canvas. Needless to say, Kim is drawn to artists whose work has influenced her. Jackson Pollack is one of her favorites and often emulates his drip technique, not to radically break the rules of paint application as Pollack did, but to use the drippy, spotted formations of smaller areas of paint to convey a sense of colorful universe that seem filled with speeding meteors, blinking light, moving planets, brilliant stars and celestial spheres at enormous distances.

   She also is drawn to Andy Warhol because he had a way with simplifying imagery, flattened them, rendering a figure or an object in the most minimal way, yet making everything recognizable. Warhol also used an unconventional color palette that made his work even more distinct. In Kim’s exhibition there are four paintings that involve the cosmos; each is a different version of “Cosmic Dreams.” Each is a subtle ground of spurts of colors moving through the heavens. “Cosmic Dreams #1” is composed largely of reds, oranges, and blues in circular swirls and nonrepetitive patters, much like the sky itself. Among her best work is “External Universe”, a painting that seems to have a quiet horizon line and mustard colored circles leading to a glowing red circle. The work is different from the Cosmic Dream series in that there is a sense of a finite place rather that infinity. It brings to mind that wherever a person stands, we see a hemisphere encircling the earth, the earth on which we stand and the sky above.

  Kim goes from cosmic to local when she finds similar patterns and beauty in a single flower. “Hydrangea” also has a sense of universe, but the image is a recognizable flower. In this way, the artist, who works in a flower shop, continually sees the universe in each flower she encounters. Her art points to the principles that structures found in the larger heavens can also be found in structures in the immediate environment. Therefore, the essence of Kim’s paintings is to document the endless beauty of the universe and in doing so show her gratitude for being part of the vast, spectacular and benevolent world.

Roberta Carasso

Art Waves

Laguna Beach, CA.

Sunny Kim is drawn to the universe

Laguna News Post, Feb. 2, 2006