Event
Hong Hong: All the Light in a Vivid Dream
Real Art Ways presents Hong Hong’s (b. 1989, Hefei, China) first solo exhibition in Hartford, Connecticut, All the Light in a Vivid Dream. The exhibition features a series of large-scale, hand-poured paperworks recently completed during Hong’s artist residency at the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory & Educational Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio. The works in this exhibition are a part of Hong’s multidisciplinary investigation of the temporal parameters of human perception, and its effects on social, cultural, and environmental systems.
Hong has traveled to various sites across the United States to make paper since 2014. During these outdoor explorations, labor has given form and structure to largely intangible events, such as weather and haptic movements. Through the engagement of repetitive processes, Hong sought to punctuate, and to provide cadence to, her experience of existence as one continuous, disorientating interval. Material became an imprint of its own metamorphosis, and a chronology of time passed. In this context, each work is a photographic still of unfolding, momentary progressions, both of the body and of the landscape the body is situated within.
The imagery in All the Light in a Vivid Dream evokes vast stretches of sea and sky, as well as the horizon line where they meet. In the artist’s words, “The horizon is an interesting place. Where does the horizon exist? Does land ever touch sky? Maybe it only does in our dreams. One can argue that the horizon is simultaneously present and absent: it is a constant, and yet, with every passing moment, it changes. I am interested in the natural expanses that we yearn for, as well as the human desire to migrate to them, map them, and with our best efforts, record them. Through land, through the sea, through sky, and through the stars, we seek and find our own coordinates.”
Ultimately, the works on view in All the Light in a Vivid Dream attempt to harness the momentary, such as the passing of a single hour, to allude to the eternal, like the dissolve of dusk into night.
Read the article in the Hartford Courant.
About the Artist
Born in Hefei, China, Hong Hong is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans papermaking, sculpture, installation, and performance. Hong earned her MFA in 2014 from the University of Georgia and her BFA in 2011 from the State University of New York at Potsdam. Her work has been exhibited across the United States in shows at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Madison Museum of Fine Art, New Mexico History Museum, and Georgia Museum of Art.
Hong is the recipient of grants and commissions from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University, the Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation, The Greater Hartford Arts Council, and Artspace New Haven. In 2017, she will complete artist residencies at PLAYA, Morgan Conservatory, and I-Park.
Hong currently lives in Connecticut, where you can find her making paper in empty parking lots and working on a yearlong, site-specific project called Everlasting Ephemera.
Image: All the Light in a Vivid Dream, hand-poured kozo, 2017
