Son Eunyeong Interview — From Painting to Photography, Documenting Homes and Gardens

Son Eunyoung studied Western painting, then set down the brush for 20 years of motherhood. Picking up a camera to photograph her children led her into photography.

Son Eunyeong, The Houses at Night, 2021, #81, archival pigment print, 60×80 cm

Son Eunyeong studied painting and then gave it up for 20 years.

A graduate of Ewha Womans University Western painting, she set down the brush after marriage to be beside her children. She bought a camera to record her children growing. That camera led her into photography.

When Her Children Began Avoiding the Camera

At first she photographed her children. Then they began avoiding the camera. With her subject disappearing where the lens pointed, she had to find another. That's when house entered her eye.

Majoring in photography-design at Hongik Graduate School of Industrial Art, she began planting the color sense and composition of Western painting into photography. The boundary between the two media became her practice.

In 2018, selected through the Seoul City Hall Skygarden Gallery open call, she held her first solo, The Underground. The next year, Black House (2019) at Gallery Bresson. To photograph houses destroyed in the Goseong (Gangwon) wildfire, she visited the site every two weeks for a year. A pivot where photography's facticity shifted toward painterly transformation.

The Houses at Night

Son Eunyeong, House on the Hill, 2024, archival pigment print, 60×50 cm

House on the Hill — real, yet a landscape beyond the real

Her The Houses at Night series, in full swing from 2020, led to the 2nd FNK Photography Award in 2021.

Time spent photoshopping each image — a month to a month-and-a-half — outweighs time shooting. She adjusts layers from medium-format digital and infrared cameras. She sharpens contrasts to emphasize wood grain and cement texture; simple surfaces like roof and garden wall she flattens on purpose. A process that carries photography into painting.

Memory Houses (2023) took two years; The Houses at Night, three. In early days she'd spend three months on one sheet. Her work was acquired in 2024 by MMCA's Government Art Bank.

From Houses to Gardens

After nearly a decade on houses, the artist opened Monet's Garden at Gallery Bresson in June 2024.

"There was a pond in front of the house I lived in as a child. Roses bloomed; my mother sprayed water. I loved that garden."

A garden is part of the house and yet not the house. Neither inside the home nor on the road — a middle. For Son Eunyeong, a garden is the threshold of memory. Window-lights on a dark path. Rain drawing circles on a pond. The sound of her mother spraying water.

The philosopher Choi Jin-seok wrote, "Desire lives in the garden; need lives in the vegetable plot." Unlike plots that grow food, gardens fill with things you cannot eat. Flowers, scent, light, pattern, and art. Her recent practice moves toward that seat of desire.

The photography critic Kim Yeongho read the shift: "The artist, who has long held to 'house,' has now stepped outside the house and toward 'garden,' expanding her sense of 'my house.'"

In 2026 she opens Houses where the time lives at GALA ART CENTER, New York.

As If Painting, As If Mending

"Moving between Seoul and provincial cities, she photographs various forms of houses, applies color as if painting, and makes them new as if mending old or worn objects."

Her process and her philosophy at once. Not leaving reality as it is but restoring it, through her hand, closer to memory. A reason photography can be a medium of creation, not only of record.

A Way of Offering a House

Son Eunyeong contributes two SAF works: The Houses at Night, 2021, #81 and House on the Hill.

84.9% of Korean artists are excluded from institutional finance. Sales of works by SAF-exhibiting artists cycle into a mutual-aid fund, returning as low-interest loans to fellow artists.

An artist who spent 20 years as a mother and returned to creation now sends houses to other houses. A house by Son Eunyeong hanging on someone's wall delivers, once more, the last value that does not vanish.

Where the Light Shines

If you have ever seen the lights of a window on a dark road, the house was no longer architecture. It was where someone waits.

What Son Eunyeong's photographs finally carry is that kind of light. A seat of memory that doesn't vanish though worn, that isn't damaged though transformed.