The Shape of Water at Visual Arts Center of Richmond: November 13, 2024 - January 12, 2025
“The Visual Arts Center of Richmond and Crafting the Future present “The Shape of Water,” a group exhibition featuring artists who explore the embodiment of the human form, connection to land, and the act of leaving impressions—both conceptual and tangible. Through dynamic installations, two-dimensional work, and functional objects, each artist transforms materials such as textile, glass, and clay, infusing their work with notions of storytelling, memory, and modernity. The exhibition title draws inspiration from the idea that water retains information. Much like personal memories, water has the ability to hold onto impressions and experiences, aligning with the exhibition’s examination of the imprints we make and those we leave behind.”
Curated by Jaynelle Hazard and Terrick Gutierrez.
Exhibiting artists include April Bey, Sam Christian, Gabrielle Ione Hickmon, Hong Hong, Kandy G. Lopez, Aryana Minai, Cedric Mitchell, Jomo Tariku, and Felandus Thames.
Opening Reception: November 13, 2024, 5 - 7 PM, Visual Arts Center of Richmond, 1812 West Main Street, Richmond, VA
For more information, please click here to visit Visual Arts Center of Richmond’s website.
Meridian at Below Grand: October 10 - November 16, 2024
“The Meridian is a passage between us, one we cannot see. We only have our sense of it. Who we were and who we will be on each side of it is something we cannot know. But on the Meridian we are hyper-sensitive, empathetic and attuned to the material and bodies near us - adopting each others’ traits and reflecting each other’s desires, without language, without certainty. Only doubt is left, as a posture that realigns us to each other. And in this sensitivity, is admiration, an artists’ artist show, of desire and who we all can vouch for as those willing to keep the meridian vibrant, alive, and who we believe will protect it from being known.”
Opening Reception: October 10, 2024, 6 - 9 PM, Below Grand Gallery, 53 Orchard St. & At 52 Allen St, New York, NY
Margie E. West Prize and solo exhibition, Inland, at University of Georgia: August 28 - November 7, 2024
The Lamar Dodd School of Art is thrilled to announce the winner of the 2024 Margie E. West Prize, an annual award given to an esteemed alum of the Lamar Dodd School of Art, who is invited to showcase their latest work in the Marjorie Eichenlaub West Gallery. The fourth recipient of the prize, Hong Hong, will present a new exhibition titled “Inland” on display from August 29 to November 7, 2024. As part of the exhibition, Hong will give a public artist lecture on her practice and thinking behind “Inland”.
In Inland, Hong Hong examines the body as a closed ecological system, where various materials continually interact to sustain and regenerate itself. The large-scale paintings are made from hand-formed paper imbued with fragments from the natural world and Hong’s personal history - invasive plants or soil collected from Leelanau Clay Cliffs, objects preserved by her late grandfather, water from the Atlantic, images of the moon, poems written by Hong and then translated by her mother. This exhibition considers subjectivity as a remote region, sovereign and far from all borders.
These site-specific works, as well as the on-going interstitial relationship between the land and the artist, time and language, proffers the body as an expanded field of activity. “I’m interested in a sense of self as a shifting set of external and internal connections, of on-going convergences,” she explains. Moments of clarity often emerge in Hong’s deep interest in narrative and the cumulative nature of story-telling. “Each sheet is a collection of debris, of passing weather, of what is useless, of what everyone loses along the way, of what we forget, of text messages, of a single day, of many days condensed together, of leftovers, of dust, of what I love, of what I hate, of soil, of pollen, of margins.”
Artist Lecture: August 28, 2024, 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm, Lamar Dodd School of Art Auditorium (S151)
Exhibition Reception: August 29, 2024, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm, Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries
Lecture at Boston University: April 16, 2024
“Hosted by the MFA programs at Boston University School of Visual Arts, the Tuesday Night Lecture Series brings practicing artists and curators to Boston University to present their work. The series is an integral component of the MFA programs which provide two years of intensive studio practice and artistic community in the heart of Boston University’s urban campus. In addition to a public lecture on their work, visiting artists meet with students for individual and group critiques as well as hands-on workshops.”
For more information about the Tuesday Night Lecture Series, please click here to visit Boston University’s website.
A Trick of Light or Distance at Brandeis University: April 3 - July 18 2024
“A Trick of Light or Distance presents five artists’ iterative processes as they negotiate materiality and place. Traversing home, landscape, migration, and memory, the artists explore the experience of locating oneself, if only temporarily. In this exhibition, Hong Hong, Kelsey Miller, Helen O’Leary, Lauren Pakradooni, and Padma Rajendran employ fiber, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and paper across site-specific and studio interventions. The artists harness, manipulate, and expand symbols and materials of our domestic and natural worlds to honor shifting relationships to tradition and land. Reflecting states of flux, labor, and physical markers of its production, their work traces cultural, geographic, and subjective notions of place.”
For more information, please click here to visit Brandeis University’s website.
A Body at the Center at Rule Gallery: March 22 - May 18, 2024
For more information, please click here to review the exhibition’s press release.
Hong Hong, Visual Arts Fellow at Tulsa Artist Fellowship: 2024 - 2026
For more information, please click here to visit Tulsa Artist Fellowship’s website.
Let the World In at Center for Maine Contemporary Art: January 27 - May 5, 2024
About the Artists:
Wilder Alison creates harmonic abstract paintings using cut, sewn & dyed wool, embedding queer theory into the act of dividing and combining. Sachiko Akiyama uses subject matter that is both personal and symbolic- birds, trees, hands, for example, and draws forth those forms from wood, resin, and paper mache, presenting fragments of the world in arrangements that appear both mysterious and familiar. Leon Benn observes and paints his surroundings, psychedelically reinterpreted in reverberating color. Jordan Carey stretches tissue paper over hand-built wooden kite forms, creating painterly depictions of his native Bermudian landscape. Diana Cherbuliez translated photographs of the construction of her home and studio on Vinalhaven into embroidered and appliquéd quilt squares made from her well-worn Carhartts. Carol Eisenberg creates fantastical color field imagery by digitally layering and manipulating her photographic fragments of leaves and flowers. Hong Hong begins her paper pulp paintings in giant outdoor baths, leaving open the possibility for dust, leaves, and airborne sediments to integrate into the finished paintings that are worlds unto themselves.
For more information, please click here to visit CMCA’s website.
Image: Diana Cherbuliez, Homemaker (6), 2017, Worn-out Carhartt work pants, thread, 8 1/2” x 12 3/8”, Courtesy of Grant Wahlquist Gallery
Hong Hong, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grantee, New York, NY: July 20, 2023
“New York, NY – The Pollock-Krasner Foundation announces it has awarded $2,657,400 to 93 artists and nonprofit organizations during its July 2022-June 2023 grant cycle, providing essential support to U.S.-based and international artists. From Austin, Texas to New York City, and from Argentina to India, the latest grant and award recipients comprise artists from 14 states and territories and 15 countries. Since the Foundation was established in 1985, it has awarded more than 5,000 grants totaling over $87 million in 79 countries. Providing funding to professional artists around the globe, the grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation support artists in creating new work and advancing their practice.”
For more information, please click here to visit Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s website.
Hong Hong, New Suns: June 20, 2023
“I walk to Lake Michigan every day. I’ve been considering large bodies of water in relation to interiority and memory. It’s impossible to have a static experience with the lake because it is fluid and constantly shifting. Consciousness is the same: present and porous; and yet, completely impenetrable. In terms of my work, I always remember the fact that all the water has to fully evaporate before the disparate substances I’m working with can be lifted as a cohesive surface. Water is a necessary part of papermaking, but it is absent from the final object. There’s a kind of loss or dissipation that’s involved in metamorphosis. In the end, something essential is always missing.”
To read the conversation between Jessica Ferrier and me, please click here to visit this issue of New Suns.
Hong Hong, Artist-in-Residence at Tusen Takk: May 22 - July 16, 2023
“The Tusen Takk Foundation is pleased to announce fifteen artists who have been selected for solo and collaborative residencies at Tusen Takk from August 2022 through December 2023. Our second season brings a group of exceptionally talented people to an inspiring place to work in a variety of media including painting, monumental paperworks, photography, music composition, textile arts, and creative writing. The 2022-23 residents are: Shruthi Rajasekar, Daniele Genadry, Jon and Cathy Cone, Debra Salopek, Juan Giraldo, Martha Tuttle, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Hong Hong, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez, Barbara Bosworth and Emily Sheffer, and Katrina Bello.”
For more information, please click here to visit Tusen Takk’s website.
Shadows and Scripts, by Chenoa Baker, at Public Parking: May 8, 2023
To read the full-length essay on Public Parking, please click here.
Lecture at School of the Art Institute of Chicago: March 9, 2023
Hong Hong, United States Artists Fellow, Chicago, IL: January 24, 2023
For more information, please click here to visit United States Artists’ website.
Keeping Score: Hong Hong and Johnathan Payne at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles: October 15 - November 6, 2022
Keeping Score
October 15 - November 6
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 15 7-10pm
“Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA is proud to present Keeping Score, an exhibition featuring large-scale works by Hong Hong and Johnathan Payne, curated by Alex Paik. For both of these artists, paper itself is a living, breathing support, carrying with it the various environmental and material processes that have been imposed upon it. Hong Hong takes material from both the local environment where she is making her paper as well as material from her family history and uses those to create monumental hand-made paper works. Johnathan Payne builds his quilt-like scaffolds from shredded comic books, using both the found imagery from the material as well as layered geometric patterns to complicate the standard intersections of a Cartesian grid. Through their work we see the elusive and constantly shifting relationships between one’s lived experience, environment, and personal journey and how that affects the formation and re-formation of identity.”
For more information, please click here to visit Tiger Strikes Asteroid’s website.
In Body at McColl Center for Art + Innovation: June 3 - August 3, 2022
“Inaugural Artists-in-Residence Hong Hong (she/her), Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz (she/her), Sarah Sudhoff (she/her) and K Sarrantonio (they/them) center their bodies – as subject or tool – in the creation of works that explores questions of identity, family history, motherhood, parenthood, isolation and contemporary society. Hong’s work marries the intensely physical paper making process with the color and compositional awareness of painting. Often working outdoors under the sun, Hong’s repeated motions – soaking, beating, rinsing, and carrying pulp, pouring and pushing the fibers on her screens, then lifting the large sheets of paper connect her to her environment and notions of time. Her ongoing movements yield an almost ritualistic choreography or movement to create an object that is both present and unformed.”
For more information, please click here to visit McColl Center’s website.
Pulp at Jonathan Hopson Gallery: May 22 - August 7, 2022
Hong Hong, Artist-in-Residence at McColl Center, Charlotte, NC: May 19 to August 9, 2022
“McColl Center is an acclaimed artist residency and contemporary art space in Charlotte, North Carolina. We believe art thrives when artists do. This one-of-a-kind place is a source of creative inspiration, growth, and support. McColl Center is where artists and people who care about them converge, connect, and thrive. As a hub for creativity and catalyst for growth, McColl Center is committed to artists first, offering subsidized artist studios, modern equipment and tools, entrepreneurship programs, and 5,000 sq. ft. of gallery space. Hong Hong, Sarah Sudhoff, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, and K Sarrantino are the Summer 2022 Artists-in-Residence. While in residency, these artists have the freedom to fully focus on artistic research, exploration, and creation while also engaging with McColl Center’s Igniters program and local community.”
For more information, please click here to visit McColl Center’s website.
ELEMENTAL: Adama Delphine Fawundu and Hong Hong at Ortega Y Gassett Projects: May 8 - June 18, 2022
For more information, please click here to visit Ortega Y Gasset’s website.
State of the Art: Constructs at Sarasota Art Museum: April 24 - September 11, 2022
For more information, please click here to visit Sarasota Art Museum’s website.
Let Them Roam Freely, by Jacquelyn Gleisner, in The Arts Paper: March 16, 2022
To read the article by Jacquelyn Gleisner, please click here.
Let Them Roam Freely at NXTHVN: March 5 - May 15, 2022
“Let Them Roam Freely is a two-person exhibition presenting newly commissioned projects and recent work by Hong Hong and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell that focus on the creation of portals through physical movement. A portal is a bridge, a gateway, a tunnel to a different time and space. Hong’s and Terrell’s respective practices evoke gateways linked to personal, communal, and cultural histories. They use performance-based methods to embody and document their passage, resulting in large-scale work on paper for Hong and photography and sound for Terrell.”
For more information, please click here to visit NXTHVN’s website.
On February 11, 2022, at 2:00 PM EST, Hong Hong will present a virtual lecture on her practice for the Visual Arts and New Media Program at SUNY Fredonia. To join this public presentation, please sign up via Eventbrite.
Printmaking Concepts at University of Texas at Dallas: February 8 - March 12, 2022
For more information, please click here to review the gallery’s website.
Cloud Cover at McClain Gallery: September 11, 2021 - January 8, 2022
"McClain Gallery presents Cloud Cover, a group exhibition focused on contemporary abstraction and materiality, featuring Edith Baumann, Anne Deleporte, Alteronce Gumby, Hong Hong, Terran Last Gun, and Elaine Reichek. The works in the exhibition propose legibility with or without text or pictorial references; they often point toward color, texture, history, nature, and mythology as cues for meaning. The exhibition title alludes to both the generosity of abstraction and its inherent ambiguity. In meteorology, Okta is a cloud cover measurement that divides the sky into eighths and momentarily defines something prone to atmospheric change. This area, represented with graphic symbols, becomes a record tied to a specific time and place, bound to change in appearance and essence at every moment. The Okta measurement only indicates sky coverage, not the particular cloud type or density, and is therefore a palimpsest of human perception. The artworks in Cloud Cover are situated in a similar plane of observation: they can equally function as a record of time, presence, atmosphere, and intention.
For more information, click here to visit Cloud Cover’s online viewing room.
In Residence: 14th Edition at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft: August 14 - October 9, 2021
“Houston Center for Contemporary Craft presents In Residence: 14th Edition, an annual exhibition of work by its 2020 – 2021 resident artists. This exhibition features work in paper, metal, clay, fiber, and stone by Chloe Darke, Abbie Preston Edmonson, Hong Hong, Hillerbrand + Magsamen, Stephanie Robison, Michael Velliquette, and Kirstin Willders. HCCC Curatorial Fellow María-Elisa Heg notes, ‘The innovation, skill, and spirit of these artists embody what makes HCCC’s artist residency program so unique. This edition opens just before HCCC’s 20th anniversary, a milestone that marks the resiliency and vibrancy of this program.’ In Residence: 14th Edition was curated by HCCC Curatorial Fellow, María-Elisa Heg.”
For more information, click here to visit Houston Center for Contemporary Craft’s website.
Reading the Weather at Art League Houston: April 23 - May 22, 2021
“Art League Houston (ALH) is proud to present Reading the Weather, an installation of work by Artist Hong Hong, currently based in Houston, Texas. Organized by the artist and Sarah Beth Wilson, ALH’s Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Projects, Reading the Weather is a monumental, site responsive paper-work installed on the façade of ALH’s building adjacent to the Sculpture Garden. Hong creates her large-scale paper-works outside due to their size, often incorporating parts of the natural environment into her process. This will be the first time, however, for her work to be physically installed in an outdoor setting for an extended duration of time. Reading the Weather will change and interact/react with the environment while it is on view outside at ALH, visually evidencing shifts in our environmental atmosphere and recording the passage of time.”
To learn more about this exhibition, click here to visit Art League Houston’s website.
A Mountain That Does Not Describe a Circle at Texas Asia Society: April 17 - July 25, 2021
“Paper’s ubiquity in our lives renders it invisible in a way, passing through our hands for functional purposes without our close attention to its physical presence. The Mountain That Does Not Describe a Circle invites us to more deeply consider the material structure and surfaces of paper, its function, and its ability to communicate a broad range of information. While we look for handwriting or printed text on most paper we encounter, these works by Hong Hong feature mark-making of their own which can be “read” through the lens of gesture – the gestures of the artist as she pours the paper pulp into the modular mould and deckle to make each large sheet of paper; arranging and layering the colored fibers to create specific shapes, lines, and textures; and affixing tape to the paper’s surface.
The performance of ritual, with its physical demands and cyclical patterns, grounds Hong’s practice and opens a channel of communication between present and past, the artist and her ancestors, and the mundane and the divine. Using the inner bark harvested from mulberry trees, she cooks and then beats the bark by hand. With the addition of fiber-reactive dyes and water, a pulp is created which she pours into an immense single sheet outside under the open sky, adding successive layers as she circumambulates the horizontal frame. Once the water has sufficiently evaporated from the sheet, it is pulled off the mould and then immediately cut into two.
Hong (b. 1989, Hefei, China, lives and works in Houston) investigates human experiences of time, dimension, and space in her work and installations. As an exhibition takes shape and her work is being installed in a space, both intentional planning and chance operations are at play. In The Mountain That Does Not Describe a Circle, the architecture of Asia Society Texas is both a support and a counterpoint for these ideas of scale, visual perception, and experiential connection.”
- Bridget Bray, Nancy C. Allen Curator & Director of Exhibitions at Texas Asia Society
To learn more about the exhibition, click here to visit Texas Asia Society’s website.
Hong Hong: Before Earth and Sky Were Separate, by Marcus Civin, in Southwest Contemporary: February 8, 2021
“Device for a Child Standing at the Mouth of a Labyrinth II (2020) uses two of the same mats from Ladle II, but this time, one is on the wall, one is on the ground rotated 180 degrees. The dominant shape is a white, rough-hewn right triangle with no pointy top—a wintry cliff to climb or an avalanche of snow. On the wall in Device, there is one black oblong on a sky blue background next to two smaller sky blue oblongs on a black background, smaller and more like kidney beans. On the ground, a blue stripe and magenta side flaps might have just opened to reveal a trap door of some sort.
Standing, waiting, looking in, or stepping back and looking up, getting a drink by taking small licks, being detached, open to chance, but possibly about to get lost, contemplating a blur, a hole, or is it a pool, a canyon, a breath, or a portal reverberating? Considering Hong’s work, one might think of everything and also of nothing. And that nothingness is everything. It’s generous and robust. To quote Weil again, ‘I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something! I must love my nothingness, love being a nothingness.’”
-Marcus Civin
To read the full-length feature article in Southwest Contemporary’s Bodies/Boundaries issue, please click here.
In Residence: Hong Hong, by Lauren Moya Ford, in Glasstire: February 8, 2021
To read the full-length article on Glasstire, please click here.
Expanding Printmaking at Florida Atlantic University: January 29 - March 6, 2021
Extra Pulp is an exchange portfolio organized by IS Projects. It features handmade paper works by 20 prominent paper makers from across the east coast, which utilize paper as its own form of expression. Selected artists include Jeanne Jaffe, Cara Lynch, Lucy Holtsnider, Ingrid Schindall, Hong Hong, Lisa Haque, Anna Tararova, Jazmine Catasus, Nicole Donnelly, Tatiana Ginsberg, Anna Hendrick Karpatkin Benjamin, Akemi Martin, Sarika Sugla, Amy Jacobs, Sarah Rose Lejeune, Sue Carrie Drummond, Beth Sheehan, Karen Hardy, Saul Melman and Kyle Holland.
To learn more about the exhibition, click here to visit Florida Atlantic University’s website. To learn more about Extra Pulp, click here to visit IS Projects’ website.
AFTERIMAGE at Maake Magazine: January 7 - February 25, 2021
For more information about this exhibition, click here to visit Maake Magazine’s website.
Hong Hong, Artist-in-Residence at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft: September 2020 - July 2021
“Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC) has announced that ten artists will become its newest class of residents for 2020-21. Each year, nearly100 artists apply to the program from across the U.S. and abroad. Eight to ten artists are selected for a three-to-twelve-month residency. This year, a panel of jurors selected ten artists based on quality of creative work, ability to interact with the public, career direction, and program diversity. The artists, whose works cover a variety of craft disciplines including clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood and mixed media, are: Joan Brown; Chloe Darke; Hillerbrand + Magsamen; Hong Hong; Nicolle LaMere; Ellie Richards; Stephanie Robison; Latrelle Rostant; Michael Velliquette and Kirstin Willders.”
For more information about this fellowship, click here to read the Glasstire article.
Questions + Answers at John & Robyn Horn Gallery: March 24 - May 3, 2020
“The artists in this exhibition are independent thinkers and flexible problem solvers. They use their imagination to form meaningful ideas and feed their curiosity. As educators, they lead by example. Within the transparency of immersive education at schools such as Penland, they provide space and leadership for students to experience the question and answer process—advancing innovation and vision before logic. Divergent thinking is a non-linear process used to generate ideas— a spontaneous, random exploration of many possible solutions. To teach divergent thinking (with the goal of achievable outcomes) is at the core of craft education. Artists must learn to respond to their own curiosity, see value in mistakes, and find connections between seemingly unrelated elements. Teaching and learning a craft embraces the skill of query and investigation—working in a space where for that moment, there are no wrong answers.”
For more information about this exhibition, click here to visit Penland School of Craft’s website.
Marrow at Artspace New Haven: March 20 - April 25, 2020
“This collection features works made in Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. Though geographically diverse in location and environmental response, each piece is created through a similar process incorporating methods dating back to papermaking’s inception, beginning with the inner bark of a mulberry tree. After being harvested, soaked, cooked, hand beaten, combined with recycled construction paper, dyed, poured and dried, the resulting works are cut, pinned and arranged in dialogue with one another. Hong describes the creation of each piece as an encounter between bodies: the soil as a body, the sun as a body, the mulberry tree as a body, and the artist as a body. It is within the physicality of the papermaking process that these bodies intersect; friends and family, flesh and blood, bone and marrow. Through these methods of fabrication, deconstruction and re-assembly, they form intimate artifacts of process.”
For more information about this exhibition, click here to visit Artspace New Haven’s website.
State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary: February 22 - May 24, 2020
“Lauren Haynes, curator of visual arts at the Momentary and curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges, is leading State of the Art 2020, along with Alejo Benedetti, associate curator of contemporary art, Crystal Bridges and Allison Glenn, associate curator of contemporary art, Crystal Bridges. The team visited studios across the country, resulting in the selection of a diverse group of 61 artists, from varied backgrounds and at different points in their careers. The 61 individuals in State of the Art 2020 represent a cross-section of artists working today and their artwork will be organized into thematic sections including world-building: creating real and fictional spaces; sense of place: investigating ideas of home, family, immigration, and more; mapping: connections to and relationships with landscapes and power, and temporality: the concept of time and how we perceive it. More than 100 artworks will be featured in State of the Art 2020 — most created in the last three years. A number of artists are making site specific works in response to the interior architecture of both spaces as well as the histories of this region. At both the Momentary and Crystal Bridges, artwork will include paintings, sculpture, photography, video, performance, and mixed media.”
For more information about this exhibition, click here to visit Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s website.
Hong Hong, Carnegie Foundation Fellow at MacDowell: December 2019 - January 2020
“The MacDowell Colony has announced that seventy-nine artists from nineteen states and six countries, including Nigeria, Mexico, and Hong Kong, will be awarded fellowships for its upcoming fall/winter residency program.
‘MacDowell is honored to provide time and space at our bucolic property for these remarkable individuals to investigate, imagine, and create new works of art,’ said executive director Philip Himberg. ‘They represent a wide and diverse range of artistic voices, reflecting a truly diverse landscape of art makers in our country and across the globe.’
Visual artists include: Tonita Cervantes, Elisabeth Condon, Pamela Council, Bruce Crownover, Marina Fridman, Clarity Haynes, Anna Hepler, Hong Hong, Carol Keller, Cyriaco Lopes, Chris Wright.”
For more information about this fellowship, click here to read the Artforum article.