Price
₩1,500,000
A unique original — the only one in the world
Art protects art
8 out of 10
artists are shut out by banks
354
loans extended to fellow artists
95%
repayment rate — trust comes full circle
~KRW 140M
interest saved vs. predatory rates
Until the next exhibition, the next performance. For artists, income gaps are an unavoidable reality. For fellow artists forced into predatory loans just to afford paint, canvas, and studio rent, proceeds from this artwork become the Seed Fund — extending a fair hand at fair rates.
Voices of fellow artists
“The memory of going hungry for three days, alone, so my children wouldn't know.”
— 50s, theater artist
“I've been putting off urgent dental treatment because I can't afford it. I should be seeing a doctor regularly, but enduring instead of going has become a habit.”
— 50s, actor
“I kept delaying ear treatment because I had no money, and the symptoms in both ears worsened.”
— 30s, musician
“I couldn't pay my hospitalized mother's bills, so we had to delay her discharge, and she had to give up tests and treatment she needed.”
— 50s, actor/broadcaster
“Because of money troubles I had nowhere to go — drifting between gosiwon rooms and rehearsal studios, and for a while sleeping rough.”
— 30s, musician
“Because of unpaid rent, my collective was forced to vacate our shared workspace and home. Neither bank loans nor artist loans could help.”
— 50s, actor
“Without money, life collapses — and creating art? Out of the question.”
— 50s, artist
“It's painful that solving this month's money problems has to come before the work itself. As an artist, I can only earn well when the work succeeds — yet I have to chase odd jobs every month instead. It feels like being trapped in a vicious cycle.”
— 40s, musician
“Debt collection calls disrupted my rehearsals and performances, and the psychological burden made every day painful and the next day frightening.”
— 40s, theater artist
“Many times the loan payments looming each month forced me to step away from performing and focus on part-time work.”
— 50s, actor
“Sleeping less than four hours a night, juggling part-time jobs and theater — but the more I performed, the more debt piled up. Eventually I decided to quit performing.”
— 30s, actor
“When things were hardest, I couldn't even attend close friends' weddings or funerals — and as a result, relationships were severed.”
— 50s, actor/broadcaster
“When I said I was a stage actor, the loan officer called me "unemployed."”
— 50s, actor
“The shame and severed friendships that came with borrowing from people I knew, the pressure of failing to pay it back, the helplessness.”
— 50s, cartoonist/visual artist
“Even with programs meant for low-income citizens, I feel shame when I can't produce enough documentation simply because I'm an artist.”
— 30s, film/broadcasting professional
One artwork becomes the oxygen that keeps a fellow artist creating.
Sales proceeds go to the artist mutual-aid fund.
Snow Field 02
Hong Jinhui
- Category
- Painting
- Material
- cotton thread on korean paper
- Size
- 52×42cm · Size 10 · Small How big is this? →
- Year
- 2024
- Price
- ₩1,500,000
- Availability
- For sale
About the Artist
Hong Jinhee is a painter who unfolds 'forests drawn with thread' in a painterly language. After graduating from the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University, she has held over 16 solo exhibitions—including 〈Forest Drawn with Thread〉 (KB Kookmin Bank Seocho PB Center, 2011; JH Gallery, 2012; Seongbuk Art Creation Center, 2015), 〈With the Forest〉 (Gallery Or, Yongin, 2025), 〈Forest, Circulation and Healing〉 (Beotyi Museum, 2024), 〈Forest of Memory〉 (Gallery Gabi, 2017), and 〈Pink Forest〉 (Gallery Life, 2016). She received the Excellence Award at the 2nd Local Color New York Competition (2013), was selected as a Yongin Special City and Yongin Cultural Foundation artist (2024–2025), and has been a multi-year grantee of the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation and the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. She published Healing Forest Created by Threads (2012). Her works are held in MMCA Art Bank and the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art.
Artist Statement
Just as countless warps and wefts cross to become cloth, dozens of layers of thread are stacked one upon another to complete my forest. Letting fine cotton thread build into tower after tower and form a forest demands a long patience. The work is hard and exhausting, but the joy of seeing thin lines come together into surfaces, and surfaces become a forest, is truly overwhelming. I draw and work with thread instead of paint. I chose thread as my material because it offers soft and rough textures and minute volumes that paint cannot express, and because countless changes in form can be pursued through delicate fingertip manipulation. Furthermore, thread carries a dual nature: it can be adjusted in brightness like paint, and it can be affixed and built into three dimensions like an object.
Thread is generally seen as a material for sewing or knitting, and its true value is recognized when it is woven into a fabric. But paradoxically I work with thread in its most fundamental and instinctive state, breaking the conventional frame and creating a new pictorial paradigm. The primal carries qualities both pure and mysterious. Seen from afar, my work resembles East Asian ink painting or watercolor, but up close one finds the layers of air and dimension held within the stacked threads, as well as a precise density and depth — a beauty and emotion that paint can never convey.
I paint forests of nature. Nature, especially what may be called its essence — the forest — is, I believe, a passage that can correct our mistaken thoughts and values. For me, nature is not merely a subject to be reproduced but a sensory world that embraces all that exists between heaven and earth. And that world flows naturally into my work. Rather than concentrating on color or form, the principal elements of painting, I focus on expressing fundamental emotions — joy, sorrow, anger, longing, compassion, fate. What is wonderful is that those who view my work also sense these emotions of mine. In those moments I feel a connection, as though we are holding an invisible thread that links us without the need for words. Tolstoy said, "Art is a means of uniting people"; for me, the thread that is the medium of my work serves precisely as that medium, bringing person to person.
Key Career Highlights
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Two beginnings made by one piece
- For you —
- One-of-a-kind in the world
- For the artist —
- the pride of standing with a peer
- For a fellow artist —
- a new ₩3,000,000 path of low-interest support
354 artists have walked this path of recovery; 95% returned to open it for the next.