Hong Kyoung-Tack

Hong Kyoung-Tack was born in 1968 in Seoul, South Korea, and earned a BFA in Painting from Kyungwon University in 1995. He held his first solo exhibition, Shrine, at Insa Art Space in Seoul in 2000, an exhibition secured through open public competition. His practice centers on hyperrealist oil paintings of everyday, mass-produced objects, pens, pencils, books, and library shelves, rendered in obsessive detail to examine consumption, order, and the accumulation of ordinary things.

Through the 2000s his exhibition history expanded quickly within Korea and abroad. He held the solo show Give and Take at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul in 2006, followed by Purgatorium at CAIS Gallery, Seoul, in 2008. His work was included in group exhibitions at institutions including the National Museum of China in Beijing (2007) and the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in Ansan (2008), among venues in Germany, Turkey, Singapore, and Argentina. In 2011 he held Pens at DOOSAN Gallery in New York, his first solo exhibition in the United States.

He continues to work in Seoul and remains active in 2026: his work appears in the group exhibition ACC NEXT: Emerging Asian Artists at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju. In market and museum contexts, his name appears under several romanizations, including Hong Kyoung Tack, Kyoung Tack Hong, Hong Kyong Tack, and Hong Kyoungtack; these all refer to the same artist.

Korean art writers and institutional texts consistently frame Hong Kyoung-Tack's work around the idea of obsessive, hyper-detailed accumulation, treating his fields of pens, pencils, and books as a form of still-life painting pushed toward the scale and density of pattern or map. Doosan Art Center's exhibition text for his 2011 New York debut described him as building his career by filling spaces with ordinary objects rendered at obsessive scale, and Korean commentary has situated his book-and-library paintings as a distinct contribution to contemporary still life. No verbatim, independently confirmed critical assessment from a named critic in a major international outlet was located in the available sources, so none is quoted here.

Hong Kyoung-Tack's auction activity is concentrated in the 2007 to 2008 boom years for Korean contemporary painting. Press coverage from that period describes a Christie's sale of a work titled Pencil 1 for roughly HKD 6.63 million, said at the time to surpass a prior 2007 result and to rank among the most expensive Korean paintings sold at that house. Separately, aggregated auction-data providers report a top realized price near USD 850,000 for the artist overall. The exact work, currency conversion, auction house, and sale date behind that top figure could not be independently confirmed across primary sources at the time of writing, so collectors should treat any single headline number with caution. As of 2026, he is listed among the artists represented by Gallery Planet, and he previously exhibited through CAIS Gallery in Seoul; there is no catalogue raisonne.

Documentation on Hong Kyoung-Tack is uneven outside Korea: his BFA, birth year, and place of birth are well corroborated, but exact auction results and museum collection holdings are inconsistently recorded across English-language sources. His work has been exhibited at major national museums in Korea, China, Argentina, and elsewhere, but public sources describe exhibition participation rather than confirmed permanent-collection acquisition, so collectors should not assume museum ownership without checking directly with the institution. With no catalogue raisonne and a thin, imprecisely documented auction record concentrated in 2007 to 2008, collectors are best served by verifying any specific work through his current gallery, Gallery Planet, his former gallery, CAIS Gallery, and through Christie's own archived sale records rather than through secondary market-data summaries alone.