Price
₩1,500,000
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 01
Hong Jinhui
- Category
- Painting
- Material
- cotton thread on korean paper
- Size
- 42×52cm · 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 thousands and tens of thousands of weft and warp threads cross to make cloth, dozens of threads are layered, one above another, until my forest is complete. Building a thread tower out of slender cotton yarn into the form of a forest takes very long patience. The work is heavy and exhausting, but the joy of seeing the thin lines gather into a plane and become a forest is truly overwhelming. Instead of paint, I draw and work with thread. The reason I chose thread as my material is the charm of textures soft and rough and the subtle volume that paint cannot express, and because, through delicate manipulation at the fingertips, countless changes of form can be pursued. Thread, like paint, can also be controlled in brightness, and like an objet it can be attached and built up into three dimensions, holding both qualities at once.
When one says "thread," most people think of it as a material used in sewing or knitting, and even there it is only when it is woven into a fabric that its original value is recognized. But I, on the contrary, use the most fundamental and instinctive state of thread to break the conventional frame and create a new paradigm of painting. The primal has the quality of being both pure and mysterious. From a distance my work may look like an Eastern painting (dongyanghwa) or a watercolor, but up close, with the layers of air and three-dimensionality, the precise density and depth that the layered threads hold, it carries a beauty and emotion one can never feel from a painting in paint.
I paint the forests of nature. Nature, and especially the forest — what could be called its essence — is, I believe, a passage through which we can correct the wrong thoughts and values we hold. For me, nature is not a mere object of representation but a world of senses encompassing all that exists between sky and earth. And that world flows naturally into my work. Rather than concentrating on color or form — the main elements of a painting — I focus on basic emotions: joy, sadness, anger, longing, compassion, fate. The remarkable thing is that those who see my work also catch hold of those emotions of mine. In those moments I feel a communion, as if I am holding an invisible thread that lets us reach each other without speaking. Tolstoy said that "art is a means of uniting people," and for me, the thread that is the medium of my work plays the role of that connector between person and 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.