Ko Young-Hoon

Ko Young-Hoon was born in 1952 on Jeju Island, South Korea. He studied Western painting at Hongik University in Seoul, earning a BFA in the Department of Painting in 1976 and an MFA from the same department in 1982, and he later held a teaching post at Hongik University. His first solo exhibition took place in 1976 at Daeho Dabang in Jeju.

He became known through a sustained series of paintings, often called Stone Book or Stonebook, that render stones and pages of text with photographic precision, positioned so that the boundary between illusion and object dissolves. Critics have connected the series to broader tensions between nature and civilization, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, has described him as a leading figure of the movement, with the 1980s Stone paintings treated as a landmark in the museum's own account of Korean art since the late 1970s.

His exhibition history includes four solo shows at the Duson Gallery in Seoul between 1985 and 1991, representation of Korea at the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986, appearances at the Messe Basel art fair in the late 1990s, and solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, London, and Amsterdam through the 1990s and 2000s. He continues to live and work in Seoul, and as of mid-2026 remains an active, exhibiting artist, most recently included in a hyperrealism survey at the Ulsan Art Museum.

Korean institutions place Ko Young-Hoon at the center of the country's hyperrealist movement. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, has described him plainly as "the top runner in Hyperrealism" in its own curatorial account of Korean modern and contemporary art since the late 1970s. The French critic Gerard Xuriguera has written of the Stone Book paintings that Ko, "combining in his painting lettered messages and their relation to stones... positions them within the pages of an open book or imposed on newspapers, strangely gravity-free, in a way that creates contrasts in tension," producing what Xuriguera calls "a sort of wakened dream... in which reality and illusion combine." The recurring critical thread across four decades is the same: illusionistic technique used to stage a quiet confrontation between the natural object and the printed page.

Ko Young-Hoon's market is difficult to characterize with precision from public sources. Korean press coverage from 2012 describes a Stone Book sculpture that had been seized in a Korean bank scandal being offered at auction with a modest reserve, and the same coverage refers to an earlier, unspecified work that "commanded the highest price" for the artist at a Sotheby's New York sale in 2007, without giving the exact figure. Auction trackers indicate that a work titled Stone Book (or Stonebook) has repeatedly set his annual record price in 2024 and 2025, but the underlying hammer price, currency, house, and date are not available in accessible public records as of this writing. Because a confirmed, sourced all-time auction record could not be established, none is published here.

Ko Young-Hoon's standing rests on museum collections in Korea, France, and the United States and on a long, documented exhibition record rather than on a well-mapped international secondary market. No catalogue raisonne has been identified, and provenance and authenticity questions are best directed to Gana Art, his long-running representing gallery in Seoul, or to Beaux-Arts Gallery in Cheongdam, which has recently promoted his work. Collectors should treat any specific auction price attributed to this artist with caution unless it can be traced to a named auction house, lot number, and sale date, since public sources as of mid-2026 do not converge on a single, verifiable all-time record.