Drawing a forest,
one thread at a time
Thread is not embroidery — it is the painter's line itself.A painter who renders the living forest through the language of fiber.
Weaving the forest —
thread as the grammar of painting
Hong Jinhui is a painter who has spent her career unfolding the forest in the language of painting — through thread. A graduate of the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University, she works with thread not as embroidery or craft but as a fundamental painterly element: the line, the mark, the trace that accumulates into image. In her hands, a single thread becomes a branch, a cluster of threads becomes a canopy, and the forest emerges — not depicted but built.
Her central body of work, the 〈Forest Drawn with Thread〉 series, began in 2011 and has continued across multiple presentations: at KB Kookmin Bank Seocho PB Center (2011), JH Gallery (2012), and Seongbuk Art Creation Center (2015). Each iteration has brought the series into new contexts, each time demonstrating how the logic of thread — its linearity, its texture, its capacity to interlace — translates into the visual language of the forest.
Across more than sixteen solo exhibitions — including Forest of Memory (Gallery Gabi, 2017), Forest, Circulation and Healing (Beotyi Museum, 2024), and With the Forest (Gallery Or, Yongin, 2025) — Hong Jinhui has extended the forest motif through seasons and states of mind: grief, consolation, renewal. The forest in her work is never merely landscape; it is a language for what otherwise remains unsaid.
Her work has been supported by the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation (2018, 2019, 2021), the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture through Seongbuk Art Creation Center (2015), and the Yongin Cultural Foundation (2024). Works are held in the MMCA Art Bank and the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art — two of the principal institutional collections for Korean contemporary art.
Hong Jinhui joins SAF not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — contributing her work so that proceeds may support the mutual-aid loan fund for artists navigating financial exclusion.
Three signatures of the work
- 1
Thread as painterly line
Thread in Hong Jinhui's work is not applied as decoration but used as the fundamental unit of mark-making. Like a brushstroke on canvas, each thread is a decision — its direction, tension, and placement building the image from the inside out.
- 2
The forest as emotional language
Across series titled Memory, Circulation, Healing, Pink, Summer — the forest is always a vehicle for emotional states. It is the space into which feeling is projected and from which consolation returns. The subject is nature; the subject is also human interiority.
- 3
Accumulation as method
The forest is not drawn in one gesture but built through the patient accumulation of thread upon thread. This durational, meditative process is central to the work — the image arrives through sustained attention, in the same way a forest grows through time.
The artist's timeline
- 2009First solo exhibition: When I Miss the Green, Gallery Topohaus, Seoul.
- 2011〈Forest Drawn with Thread〉 series debut, KB Kookmin Bank Seocho PB Center, Seoul. Encouragement Prize, 6th Kyunghyang Art Competition.
- 2012〈Forest Drawn with Thread〉, JH Gallery, Seoul. Published Healing Forest Created by Threads (Orange Digit Korea).
- 2015〈Forest Drawn with Thread〉, Seongbuk Art Creation Center, Seoul. Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture selected artist.
- 2016〈Pink Forest〉, Gallery Life, Seoul. Singapore Affordable Art Fair, F1 Pit Building.
- 2017〈Forest of Memory〉, Gallery Gabi, Seoul.
- 2018–21Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation selected artist (2018, 2019, 2021). Songjeong Art Culture Foundation support (2021). Donuimun Museum Village artist (2020, 2021). 38th Galleries Art Fair, COEX (2020).
- 2024〈Forest, Circulation and Healing〉, Beotyi Museum Gallery, Yongin. Yongin Cultural Foundation selected artist.
- 2025〈With the Forest〉, Gallery Or, Yongin. Yongin Special City Cultural Arts selected artist.
Collections
- MMCA Art Bank (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), Korea
- Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyeonggi-do
- Gallery Gabi, Daelim Changgo Gallery, JH Gallery, THE K Gallery, and numerous private collections
Two essays —
on thread, forest, and painting
1〈Forest Drawn with Thread〉 — the meeting point of fiber and painting
The title of Hong Jinhui's central series is a precise description of its method: Forest Drawn with Thread. Not a forest embroidered, stitched, or woven — but drawn. The verb is borrowed from painting, and this borrowing is deliberate. Thread, in her practice, is not what it is in craft tradition; it is the painter's instrument, applied to the surface as one would apply a line.
This reframing opens a productive ambiguity. Thread carries the memory of the textile — its weight, its texture, its capacity to interlock — but it performs the function of the brushstroke: it describes, it suggests, it accumulates into image. A forest built from thread is neither painting nor fiber art in the conventional sense; it is something that works at the boundary between them, drawing energy from both.
The series premiered in 2011 at KB Kookmin Bank Seocho PB Center and continued through JH Gallery (2012) and Seongbuk Art Creation Center (2015). Each presentation returned to the same question — what does it mean to draw a forest with thread? — and found a different answer. The forest shifts with the season, the light, the mood of the making. It is not a fixed image but a recurring inquiry.
2Between thread and painting — a practice of sustained attention
Hong Jinhui's practice is distinguished by duration. To build a forest from thread is to engage in a process of patient, repetitive attention — placing one thread, then another, then another, until the image emerges from the accumulation. This is not fast work. It asks for the kind of sustained concentration that allows the maker to notice things about the material that hurried work would miss.
The process is meditative in a specific sense: not passive or emptying, but actively attentive. Each thread placed is a question about the next: where does it go, how does it lie, what does it change in what was there before? The forest is built incrementally, the way actual forests grow — not in one act of creation but through the quiet accumulation of time and material.
This attentiveness to material and process is reflected in the themes that run through the series: healing, memory, circulation, togetherness. These are not concepts imposed on the work from outside; they arise from within the making. An artwork entitled Forest, Circulation and Healing or With the Forest is already describing what the process of making it felt like — the movement through the forest, the companionship of the trees. Hong Jinhui joins SAF in this same spirit of attentive solidarity: contributing her work so that the field she loves might remain open to those who come after.
Thread is perhaps the most patient of materials — it holds whatever shape it is given, accumulates quietly, and builds, over time, something that exceeds its individual parts. In Hong Jinhui's work, this patience becomes a method, and the forest that emerges from it becomes a language for everything that grows quietly, without announcement, into something larger than itself.
Selected Works
2 works are featured here.
Hong Jinhui joined this campaign in solidarity with fellow artists. Every work sold flows directly into the artists' mutual-aid loan fund— a purchase becomes the next month's lifeline for an artist navigating financial exclusion today.
