ART COURTESY OF SEONNA HONG
Los Angeles – based visual artist Seonna Hong doesn’ t live in Silver Lake, Echo Park, or Venice. She’ s nestled away in Mount Washington, a secluded neighborhood in the San Rafael Hills some distance from those other hip urban hubs. Her living room is braced by tree-size wooden posts and dominated by a panoramic view of the mountains— a living work of art in its own right. And her nearly windowless studio, carved into a mountainside, has hidden compartments, cubbyholes, and a bookcase that, when pulled open, leads into a secret workroom.
“ Welcome to my clubhouse,” the artist says as she ushers me in on a peaceful, gray Sunday afternoon.
Hong, born in 1973 in Southern California, has never abandoned her imagination— and, in some ways, her childhood. As a kid, one of her first projects was making animals out of glued-together Fruit Loops and construction paper( and then picking off the pieces of cereal and gobbling them up). In elementary school, she recreated Hello Kitty and Strawberry Shortcake characters, and in high school she won over the jocks with photo-realistic drawings of Danzig.
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