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.
