RULE Gallery is pleased to introduce A Body at the Center, the first major solo presentation of Hong Hong's monumental paintings in the Western United States. The artist will attend a public reception on Friday, March 22, from 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition will be on view through May 18, 2024. Note that new gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am-5pm, and by appointment.
Each summer and fall, artist Hong Hong travels to faraway and distinct locations within the United States to create site-responsive, large-scale works made from paper. In this nomadic practice, methods of Chinese paper-making coalesce with painting and monastic rituals. The resulting environmental experimentations chart interstitial relationships between landscape, time, and the body through cartographic, symbolic, and material languages. When the weather is adverse, Hong produces works directly on the floor of her studio. Each combines intergenerational visual story-telling, collaborative texts, and image-making to document states of interiority and subjectivity.
The exhibition at RULE features pieces created over the last five years in New York, Texas, Michigan, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. Through shifts across surface and materiality, they each map a specific place on a particular day during a different season. Poured in consecutive layers and dried beneath the sun, the paper pulp's supple surface remains vulnerable to its environment, giving shape to evolving changes within its surroundings and becoming a collaborative record with nature. A Body at the Center considers the self as a field of activity and an unfolding event. The installation was guided by measurements taken directly from Hong's own body as a reference point. Specifically, the gap between the floating sheet and the gallery wall is equivalent to the distance between Hong's navel and heart. It also examines the body's relationship to exterior as well as interior spaces through installation methods that allude to partitions, gates, floors, pools, and windows.
The keystone of this exhibition is a text-based work. Hidden in shadow, this piece is visible to the viewer but is not legible or comprehensible. The text is an accumulation of Hong's prose, which she wrote as she traveled. This text weaves together Hong's writing with excerpts from text messages, essays, books, and poems. Sections of the text are used as the titles of the projects included in this show.