Ilhwa HONG

Hong Ilhwa

The Hour Between Wolf and Dog

I am a painter of the forest. For a long time, I thought I had grasped it: I identified the tree species, analyzed the symbioses, deciphered the established order. But the forest always eluded me, inhabiting a dimension vaster, slower, and more sovereign than the names I gave it. If I title this exhibition “The Hour Between Wolf and Dog,” it is to capture this vertigo of indistinction. This pivotal moment, at twilight, when the light flickers and we no longer know if the approaching silhouette is a submissive animal or a wild threat.

In this in-between space, certainty fades. We no longer know what is domestic and what is wild. I see in this the mirror of our own gaze upon nature. We have spent centuries compartmentalizing the forest: the sanctuary to be preserved versus the element to be banished, the native versus the intruder, order versus chaos—even going so far as to forge the concept of “invasive species.” Yet, in the eyes of forest time, these divisions are merely precarious borders drawn by humankind. When a neglected dog returns to the wild, or when an invasive species establishes a new equilibrium, the being is no longer either dog or wolf. It is this interstice that I explore: a state of pure indistinction. Here, the hour I speak of is not simply a luminous transition; it is the instant when humanity’s pretension to govern life collapses.

This intuition resonates with the thought of Marcel Proust. For him, time does not flow, it settles. At dusk, when outlines dissolve, the tangible world fades away, allowing memory to surface. My forest is not that of the eye, but that of reminiscence, a stratum of sensations where eras erode and merge. I choose to say "the hour between wolf and dog" rather than the reverse. For this time is not born of the human order—that of control and home—but arises from wild terror, from absolute otherness. The wolf asserts itself first; the dog, then, loses its name. In this reversal, I seek to dethrone our anthropocentric gaze.

 

For this series, I have reintroduced the human and the animal into the heart of the woods. Until now, the forest was for me an absolute from which humankind had to be absent for it to reveal itself. I painted its inviolate silence. But faced with this “hour between wolf and dog,” human exile is no longer possible. The human is already woven into the fabric, and the animal is transformed by contact with our shadows. The figures that haunt my canvases are not subjects of narrative, but points of rupture. They do not comment on nature; they stand there, between memory and present, between taming and fury, unable to distinguish themselves from their surroundings.

 

This exhibition is not a celebration of the forest, but a crisis of our perception. Like two silhouettes merging into the dying gold of evening, each being here leaves its name to be infused with the otherness of the other.