Haseo Shin Hyekyung, Hong Mihee: Halluciantion
Kimreeaa Gallery is pleased to present Hallucination (환영), a two-person exhibition by Haseo Shin Hyekyung and Hong Mihee, on view from October 16 to November 15, 2025. The exhibition brings together Shin’s World of Singularity and Hong’s ‘Landscapes of Nature’, exploring the boundaries between reality and unreality, observation and immersion, surface and volume. The title Hallucination (환영) metaphorically evokes the dimensions of perception that arise between what is seen and what is believed, illusion and intuition, encapsulating the core sensibility shared by both artists.
In Les Paradis artificiels (1860), Charles Baudelaire investigated the aesthetic and philosophical significance of hallucination through experiences with opium and hashish. He noted not only the ecstasy and spiritual elevation such visions could induce but also their dangers of degeneration and ruin. For Baudelaire, hallucination was not a hymn to pleasure but a stage that revealed the tension between artistic imagination and collapse. Much like how AI interweaves fact and fiction to fill the gaps of reality with imagination, we come to realize that hallucination is a captivating yet perilous artificial paradise—at once a risk of mistaking fiction for truth and a space of creative possibility.
Within this context, Shin Hyekyung collects fragments of the everyday, unseen vibrations, and quantum potentialities to construct an ecosystem of sensations and memories. Her notion of the “singularity” marks both a threshold where established order collapses and a site of emergence for new patterns and narratives. Through layered images, data, and memories, her paintings open a landscape of another dimension, offering viewers freedom and release through processes of immersion and challenge.
Hong Mihee translates colors and experiences gathered from nature into semi-relief paintings. Extending beyond the flat canvas into its edges and surrounding space, her works propose a new dimension where surface and form intersect. By repeating and varying color-band reliefs, her paintings reveal the dissonance between seeing and being, allowing viewers to sense the depth and rhythm of a mountain journey. Her new work, In the Forest, presents both a real landscape and a world governed by a different order beyond reality.
Both artists engage in a practice of “collecting,” though in divergent ways. Shin visualizes invisible vibrations and singularities to propose mental landscapes, while Hong expands the boundary between the real and the illusory through reliefs derived from natural colors and forms. Their works suggest that mistakes, misreadings, and illusions can lead to deeper truths, and that the reality we perceive may not be the only truth that exists.
Hallucination (환영) thus becomes a “laboratory of perception” shaped by the two artists. Within this space, viewers encounter the tension between reality and unreality, presence and illusion, creation and dissolution, stepping momentarily outside the framework of their assumed reality to experience an expansion of thought.
