Hong Hong
She // Her // Hers
[ID: A Chinese woman with dark, shoulder-length hair and silver-rimmed glasses stands in front of the red leaves of a sourwood tree. She looks into the camera smiling.]
Portrait photo by Jamey Hart, courtesy of the artist.
Beverly, MA
2023 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by the Barr Foundation.
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Born in Hefei, Anhui, China, Hong Hong earned her BFA from the State University of New York at Potsdam and her MFA from the University of Georgia. Since 2015, Hong has traveled to faraway and distinct locations to create site-responsive, monumental paper works. In this nomadic practice, ancestral methods of Chinese paper-making coalesce with painting, monastic rituals, and feminist performances. Recent projects map interstitial relationships between exile, landscape, the passage of time, and the Chinese diaspora through cartographic, symbolic, and material languages.
Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at numerous institutions across the US, including Sarasota Art Museum (Sarasota, FL), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (New York City), Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), NXTHVN (New Haven, CT), among others. Her practice has received press and coverage in publications such as Art21, Art New England, Southwest Contemporary, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, and Glasstire.
She has been the recipient of a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship at MacDowell (2020), a Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center (2019), an Artistic Excellence Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of Arts (2019), and a Creation of New Work Grant from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation (2018-2019). She has also participated in residencies at Yaddo (2019), the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2020–2021), McColl Center (2022), and I-Park (2018). In 2021, she joined the studio art program at Endicott College as an Assistant Professor. Hong currently lives and works in Massachusetts.
A nomadic, environmental pour, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist.[ID: A horizontal wooden frame lays on top of a grassy lawn. The rectangular structure is filled with a wet mixture of blue/black pigments, hand-beaten bark, repurposed paper, and water collected during regional storms. These substances dry slowly in the sunlight.]
Not Yet Heaven and Earth, Only Images without Form, 2021. Hand-formed paper made with mulberry bark, pigment, dust, hair, fiber-reactive dyes, repurposed paper, water from White Oak Bayou, leaves from unknown tree, and sun. Photo courtesy of the artist.[ID: A large, abstract painting made of hand-formed paper and site-specific foliage. The left half of the work is a gradient of blue into white with a central, black, oblong motif. The right half of the image resembles a deepening black hole or void with white patterns scattered across. The artist stands in front of the work.]
Mother and I: Chart of the Inner Warp, 2022. Hand-formed paper made with mother’s translation of my poem in puff paint, pigment, recycled materials, and water collected during a North Carolina storm. 106 × 126 inches. Photo by Ben Premeaux, courtesy of the artist and McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Charlotte, NC.[ID: A large, mixed-media painting made with hand-formed paper, calligraphic text, and paint. The background is a series of reverberating circles composed primarily of black and red stripes. There is a mixture of Chinese characters, a rendering of a dragon, and lines move the foreground and middle-ground sporadically.]