Seonna Hong - "Past Lives": at Saint Mary's College Museum of Art

An art exhibition that illuminates discovery and destiny through memory-infused landscapes, ancestral Korean heritage, and shifting environmental concerns.

On February 12, 2025, Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art (SMCMoA) is opening Past Lives, a solo exhibition featuring thirty-two paintings and repurposed mixed-media work by artist Seonna Hong. Showcasing work created over 15 years, Past Lives explores landscapes, the figure, and repurposed materials as a vessel for magical thinking.

Hong (b. 1973) is a Los Angeles-based artist who explores memory and narrative through her art practice. In the exhibition Past Lives, Hong weaves stories and symbols from one lived experience to another, reflecting on past life chapters and threading meaning through memory, fate, and ancestral heritage. For Hong, painting constitutes a reflective journal—an art form that lets her look back and see invariable, distinct chapters with a discernible trajectory. In these times of reflection, Hong often feels like these memories represent a different life.

The exhibition title, borrowed from the 2023 film, examines identity-defining memories and how threads of fate expand and connect through reflection and imposed narratives. Hong explains, “There is an undeniable romanticism tied to longing, a connection to a time and place and all of its roots, but it is through choosing to live in the present moment that true love shows itself, because it is here that all the layers are seen.”

Hong often repurposes materials in her art practice while also portraying places that speak to environmental uncertainties caused by humans and their position within the landscape. Her new works, Atacama I and Atacama II,place the viewer in the driest non polar desert in the world—a location that is culturally praised as a tourist destination for stargazing. Here, Hong chooses to depict her figures moving amongst dunes of discarded fabric waste, which draws attention to the environmental concerns of the fast fashion industry and its impact on the landscape. By choosing to ground her memory landscapes into known places of environmental uncertainties, Hong connects Past Lives to the future, enabling time to be unwoven in various directions.

Several works in the exhibition tether Hong to her ancestral Korean heritage. Bears and tigers act as emblems in her work, connecting personal totems to traditional origin tales. Following the upsurge of 2020’s anti-Asian violence, Hong’s embracement of traditional clothing, such as hanboks, acts as cultural pride. In the exhibition, two hanboks sewed from recycled denim and other fabric are positioned on a neolttwigi, an acrobatic Korean game bearing a resemblance to a seesaw. The placement of the hanboks on the neolttwigi captures a sense of play and pride, bringing together the multiple dimensions of interlaced Western and Eastern heritage.

Some paintings will appear in versions yet to be seen by the public. Hong shares, “In [this] body of work, I have included pieces that show my past lives as well as older works that, in the spirit of re-use, repurpose, and upcycling, have been painted into and brought from the past into the present, being mindful to not just gesso over the canvas (a literal and metaphorical whitewash), but include some of its history, the layers.”