Cognitive Dissonance

Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present Cognitive Dissonance, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Seonna Hong. In her latest solo exhibition, the artist's deeply introspective work functions as both visual journal and emotional terrain, tracing the patterns of contemporary life through abstraction, landscape, and gesture. Viewing painting as a map of her internal experience, the artist embeds emotion into the landscapes themselves within the striations of the sky, jagged rock and shifting atmospheres. Figures appear as anchors or witnesses: sometimes they represent the artist, sometimes no one particular person at all. The works in Cognitive Dissonance emerge from a period of heightened cognitive and emotional tension shaped by political unrest in the U.S., global conflict, environmental catastrophe, and the persistence of connection, tenderness, and daily ritual. The exhibition moves between capturing a sense of urgency and restraint. Hong throws, scrapes, and pushes paint in moments of overwhelm, then slows into thin, delicate "quilted" washes applied with meditative precision. The artist draws a parallel to bojagi, the Korean textile tradition that pieces fragments into functional abstraction, an act of both rupture and repair. Scale operates as another emotional register: large works capture physical intensity, while smaller paintings return to the immediacy of her early studies on hardware store paint chips. Cognitive Dissonance holds the contradictions of our present day moment: chaos and quiet, grief and compassion, the spectacular and the mundane. It is a record of trying to remain human, engaged, and honest as the world feels simultaneously too much and yet also not enough. Join us for the opening of Cognitive Dissonance on Saturday, December 13th with a reception from 6pm - 8pm. The artist will be in attendance. In conjunction with the exhibition, we will be releasing a new limited edition print, first available exclusively in person at the opening followed by an online release at a later date.