SOON.EASY

For those who are unfamiliar, who are you and what do you do? 

Hello, I'm soon.easy. I’m based in Seoul and mainly focus on painting, as well as sculpture and commercial illustration. I mainly work on capturing the negative aspects of society and humans and expressing them with a gloomy sense of humour.

Can you share a bit about your background as an artist and how your artistic journey began?

I've loved drawing since I was young. At that time, I was into Japanese comics like Dragon Ball and wanted to become a cartoonist. That may be the reason why many of my paintings have cartoon and illustration aspects. As I grew up, I became interested in fine art and majored in it. I think my current paintings come from a mixture of my two interesting fields.

Walk us through your creative process when starting a new project. How do you generateideas and translate them into a visual concept?

I usually write down the content I want to express in a note app. And when I discover a certainmaterial, I visualise the idea by identifying the central structure of that material and matching it withsuitable content from what I wrote down. Of course, not all processes are carried out systematically.

Can you talk us through your last exhibition ‘Sent From My iPhone’?

This is an exhibition planned with attention to the material aspect of the creative methods mentioned above.

The iPhone album is full of everyday, clearly visible and tangible material that I personally photographed.Using such materials, the exhibition consisted of paintings that pointed out negative or creepy parts of life.

Where do you see the future of your painting and design? Are there new directions or projects you aspire to explore that further blend these roles?

I am interested in display methods that combine painting and installation. It's a story between a painting and the way it's shown, and the more I explore it, the more I think it's a genre that requires a high level of formative design sense in addition to painting, so it's not easy.

How do you define success as an artist, and have your definitions evolved over time?

That's a difficult question. At first, I thought that if I could do exactly what I wanted to do, that would be a success, but as time went by and I pursued various artistic activities, I came to think that that was not all. Perhaps, as my greed grows, I am losing essential definition.. So, when I think too much and the phenomenon becomes complicated, I sometimes try to recall the original definition.

If you could collaborate with any historical or fictional character on an art project, who would it be and what kind of artwork do you imagine creating together?

I'm interested in street artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey. Their work and the way they present it is very tough and democratic. I often think about what it would be like to show my work with thosestreet rules.