Born in Hsinchu on the island of Formosa, Sophie Hong is a natural heir to the elegance of traditional Chinese costume, yet she is wary of any attachment to the past.
There is no copying in Sophie Hong's work, no repetition. Rather, she offers our time and our society an art that is sure of its place in this world. She does not reject representation. The lines of her coats or tunics may have a ceremonial quality, but that quality is vibrant, not static: a musicality of form that leads admirers to wear these clothes on an everyday basis.

When Sophie Hong designs a garment, when she transforms a virgin piece of fabric as a painter transforms a canvas, she lays down coat after coat of dye, pigments elaborately combined and refined and matured by a delicate alchemy. Her whole palette is drawn from the matrix of the earth iself and its minerals: shades of ochre, burnt siennas reminiscent of Antoni Tàpies, browns ranging to a volcanic violet, blacks with flashes of slate-gray worthy of Pierre Soulages, undefinable deep blues – revisited China blues, impossible to say whether they are "blue, black or night" – and strong greens that pay homage to all the forests of the world.

These hues, created by means of age-old techniques, are applied in layers on silk fabric spread out in the open air. The procedure follows ritual rules based on lunar and seasonal phases. Clay always plays a part – a primitive clay present at each step of this slow process of gestation. Particular attention is paid to the tissue's original surface, the now hidden face of the permanent and stable fabric, which penetrates the visible surface and lends it an intense secret rhythm.

From the resulting sumptuously tinted planes of lacquered silk, Sophie Hong cuts sober and disciplined garments that blend tradition and modernity, musical variations on a China rediscovered. As a final touch, she adds astonishing diagonal stripes which subtly yet boldly link color ranges of varying vividness - highlights that mark off the contours of the clothing (cuffs, collars, edges of component pieces of fabric, central opening, and so on). Sophie Hong does not hesitate to incorporate silent poses into her clothes and then connect their outlines as a kind of punctuation of the "text" of the item. Such vertical lines may be looked upon as "lines of force" at strategic points of the garment, or as lines of convergence of a tableau vivant. They invest the garment as worn with a dynamic rhythm, to which each wearer adds his or own particular vibrato.