河/River. 2021 - 2024. 109 inches (H) x 174 inches (W) x 45 inches (D). Materials: Hand-formed paper made with repurposed paper products, sun, rain, acrylic paint, Sumi ink, poems, a feather from a Northern Flicker, fallen foliage, and water from the Massachusetts Bay, White Oak Bayou, and Arkansas River.
Hong Hong
Oklahoma, USA
Visual
Artist in Residence
Chiaro Award
↗ www.honghong.studio
Artist Statement
Every summer I go outside to make paper under the sky. Each pour begins at dawn and ends at dusk, marking the birth and death of a single day. During this time, I rotate around a large-scale, rectangular structure, pouring a mixture of rainwater, repurposed paper, foliage and pigment into the frame as I walk. I work with water to build imagery. I use my hands and arms to sense its weight, velocity and direction. I repeatedly push, bend, dip, lower and empty this water. As the wet substances dry outdoors, debris from the surroundings falls onto and becomes a part of the work. Passing weather registers as folds and textures across its surface. Each painting is the cast or transcription of a moment of contact. The act of making a painting is a way to initiate relations between myself and “them”: sky, wind, rain, trees, heat, clouds, memory, history, and sun. They approach me, I move between them.
Any object that depends on the spinning of the earth to fully form, contains some version of truth.
While at Headlands
I’m loosely interested in diaspora as a spatial process where multiple temporal horizons and languages converge, then separate. I want to know more about what is lost and what can be gained through this. I’m interested in a sense of self simultaneously rooted in large-ness, materiality, and subjectivity. I want to know more about relationships between places that exist inside my body and places that exist outside my body. I want to know what and who can be transformed in these interactions. I’m not interested in comprehensibility or representation. I’m equally uninterested in abstraction. I think about my identity as a series of moments in which connections with a point-of-origin or a future takes place. There isn’t a single point-of-origin or a single future. There are many. My work at Headlands (and in my life) is an index of these possibilities.
Hong Hong
Born in Hefei, Anhui, China and currently based in Oklahoma, Hong Hong works with image-making and language through repetition, movement, accumulation, limitation, translation, evaporation, and dispersion. She considers the materiality of the body, the histories of craft, and the practice of painting in relation to identity, poetry, memory, nations, and land. Hong’s practice centers the creation and preservation of a Chinese-American subjectivity rooted in largeness, opacity, multiplicity, and self-definition.
Hong Hong is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, Chiaro Award in Painting at Headlands Center for the Arts, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship in Craft, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Painting, Carnegie Foundation Fellowship at MacDowell, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, and Artistic Excellence Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of Arts. She has participated in residencies at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Yaddo, and I-Park.
Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Diverseworks (Houston, TX), Oklahoma Contemporary (Oklahoma City, OK), Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (New York, NY), Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME), NXTHVN (New Haven, CT), Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg, MA), Tephra Institute for Contemporary Art (Reston, VA), San Francisco Center for Book Arts (San Francisco, CA), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA), Akron Art Museum (Akron, OH), Texas Asia Society (Houston, TX), and University of Texas at Dallas (Dallas, TX), among others.
