Not far from the sea, artist Hong Hong and I are sitting together under the skylight of her Beverly studio. We’re surrounded by several large-scale sculptural paper works soon to be shipped across the country, and Hong is describing her process to me, speaking in her candid way of stories and poetry. Having first been introduced through email, our meeting under the calm wash of light feels almost surreal as she conjures an image of the rituals through which her physically intensive practice arises.
Each summer and fall, the artist travels to faraway locations to make paper, utilizing various pulps created by fermenting paper-based materials in sealed containers for months at a time. Time, heat, and bacteria alter the saturation as well as the hue of color, resulting in variations of blues, browns, blacks, or reds—gradients that characterize much of Hong’s work. The process of what she refers to as “environmental pours” starts before sunrise, in the dark, virtually without sight. The experience crucially describes the scale and activities of the artist’s body: boundaries reference the exact lengths she can reach before losing balance; there are imprints of fingertips and remnants of hair; edges communicate the gestures and placements of arms or a torso. During the winter and spring, she forms paintings directly on the floor of her studio.
Hong’s environmental, site-specific investigations thus map interstitial relationships between landscape, time, and the body through cartographic, symbolic, and material languages. These schematics combine intergenerational storytelling, collaborative texts, and image-making to document states of interiority and subjectivity, human and nonhuman. In this interview, we expand further upon her approach to large-scale papermaking as a kind of geography of bodies and the cosmos.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed.
Hong Hong, 诗/ Poem, 2023. Hand-formed paper made water from Lake Michigan, sun, repurposed paper products, puff paint, and fiber-reactive dyes. 95″ x 113″. Photo by Julia Featheringill Photography. Courtesy of the artist.
Danni Shen: Your paper making practice is very much site-specific, seasonal as well as nomadic. You start in the dark to mark the birth and death of a single day. Can you speak to your process as a dynamic ritual where your body also becomes a kind of geography?
Hong Hong: The first map we make and memorize is a diagram of our body. Where are the shoulders, elbows, stomach, and feet located? What is the sequence or order of these parts in relation to each other and to the whole? Eventually, we begin to recognize our eyes as our own. A sense of self somehow arises from a corporeal arrangement made of bone, flesh, blood, and skin.
Body-geographies make movement possible: we utilize the knowledge that we have of our bodies to try to alter our positions in space. I believe the second map we make is a schematic of the cosmos. This is a world-geography. It encompasses the sky and land, the distance between us, and the edge of the observable universe. But it also contains everyday sites, like a particular street or a room at home. It is not separate from social, political, economic, and cultural systems.
DS: How do you see body and world geographies intersecting, or separating?
HH: My practice centers around a diasporic body that exists in place and in time. It also speaks to the connections this individual body has to other bodies at a precise moment or within a distinct atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. For example, does the sun have its own body-geography? What would time’s body-geography look like? What about a lake, my mother, or my mother’s favorite writer? If these diagrams were visible to me, how would they be different from or similar to mine?
DS: You have long-term ties to New England, having lived in Connecticut for about five years before landing in Beverly, Massachusetts, where you are currently. Are there particular kinds of sites and ecosystems that generally have drawn you to a place?
HH: Each place is an organism with really specific behaviors and tendencies. Shifts in the quality of light. The density of an atmosphere. The color of pollen. The hue of dust. The frequency of rain or snow and the months of a year they typically arrive. High tide, low tide. When the first magnolia opens. Humidity. The direction and flow of traffic on a particular day. A city’s infrastructure. The movement of people, animals, or a single cloud. Of course, there are also various ecosystems. These things often directly enter into my work. On some level, I immerse myself in the cycles of a location. I read the sky. I read water. I read land. I read the weather.
To be honest, I don’t think too much about what draws me to a site. The tension between departure and return is more interesting to me. During my time in New England, I spent months of the year away. But I’d always come back. What made me want to go elsewhere? Why do we sometimes choose to leave? When does homesickness enter into us and where does it live? Are we somehow bound to return to our point of origin? Movement is a physical and logistical experience. But there is also something emotionally resonant about it.
(Both) Documentation of an in-process, environmental pour. Leland, MI. 2023. Photos courtesy of the artist.
DS: How does working in the elements impact the materiality of the work?
HH: Outdoor conditions affect my work in many ways. For example, I was in the Great Lakes region last summer. When I arrived, hundreds of thousands of mayflies were swarming along the coast of Northern Michigan. A mayfly spends one to two years as larvae and aquatic nymphs. But they only live for about twenty-four hours after emerging from the water. As the mayflies died, they fell and landed in piles across my frame, which was built on the edge of the lake. The sheets formed in late May are imprinted with remnants of insect wings and legs.
There were also two rainstorms with strong gusts of wind, one in June and another in July. The panels that coincided with this weather filled with pine seeds and needles as the trees in that area shed their leaves.
DS: I’m curious about your medium choice during papermaking, as well as the ways in which you collect various (often paper-based) residues, from images, memories, and poetry to family text messages—these things from your everyday life that you then integrate into the work and image-making.
HH: All technology centers around and extends the human body. Telephones elongate the voice. Telescopes lengthen our eyes. Paper is a technology, just as language, images, and memories are technologies. They modify, restructure, and enlarge the scale of a human body. When we read a poem or recall the past, linear time recedes. Another presence enters into us. We are no longer fully ourselves because our consciousness is possessed by someone or something else. That is, we momentarily become more than who we are.
I would loosely describe my approach as the creation of material and poetic archives. I’m also fascinated by archives that do not work. What happens when historical documents are so subjective that they cease to function? What becomes possible when history or literature can no longer be accurately interpreted or studied? And lastly, what kinds of truths can these schematics carry into the future once this failure or disruption occurs?
Each sheet is a collection of debris, of passing weather, of fragments, of what is useless, of what everyone loses along the way, of what we forget or throw away, 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. Like my body, the work is a whole made up of sections. Like all bodies, it is not stable: it remains open to touch. Like choreography, the process is not reproducible: it changes each time it is reenacted.
DS: You mentioned how your forms are informed by various cosmologies from different cultures regarding the birth of the universe and humankind. What is the role of cosmology and mythology in your process?
HH: I love stories. Specifically, I’m interested in ones that we tell over and over again, things that are passed on generationally. Most of these are our earliest origin stories. A story that’s been passed down in my family is that two of my ancestors, who were fishermen, once saved a man from drowning. This man later ascended the throne and gifted the brothers with titles as well as the last name of “Wang,” which means king or noble. They also received land, which we eventually lost during the Cultural Revolution.
Cosmologies are like maps in that they are diagrammatic and chronological representations of ourselves and of the world. Because so much of my work is rooted in navigation and a process of locating where I am within interior or exterior spaces, it made sense to directly relate particular actions (a single cut that divides each full sheet into two halves, walking around the frame when I pour) and visual vocabularies (the double sphere, the single sphere) to these narratives. Recently, mathematical and scientific measurements of the cosmos have also started to dictate the work.
Practically speaking, what I do relies on cosmology. The disparate substances I work with can’t be lifted as a coherent piece until all the water has evaporated through extended exposure to heat and light. The completion of a work depends on the relationship between the earth and the sun. Shadows are visual motifs that repeat in multiple pieces: each shadow is made through the interaction between a human body and a celestial body at a specific time and season.
Portrait of Hong Hong in front of 内陆/Inland inside her studio. Photo by Mel Taing for Boston Art Review.
DS: Your most recent work, such as 内陆/Inland (2023), seems to turn away from abstraction toward an assemblage of multiple layers (and days of making them) of stories, landscapes, texts, and portraiture that draws from a kind of interiority as well as subjectivity. Can you talk further about how your work has changed over time?
HH: The transition happened very quickly, over the course of a week. In 2022, I did my first on-site commission. Because it was January, I had to form the sheet indoors. Being in that room changed me. Galleries are sterile. The sun, weather, trees, and bodies of water are not present here. There are no animals. Temperature and light remain constant. The division of night and day is not tangible. Initially, there was a sense of emptiness and loss.
Through this experience, I was able to recognize the importance of collaboration and presence in my practice. I previously considered the environmental pours as parts of a system for navigation. But I think they were also mechanisms for multiple organisms to come together and compose or rearrange a single day. At that point, I knew I needed other beings in that space with me, so I brought in some of my books.
I started to sketch with text, not with images. I spent time transcribing conversations, essays, and poems. I previously understood site-specificity as the negotiations between a body and an external environment.
DS: How do you locate yourself in relation to that kind of interior landscape, which seems to influence a newer approach to schematics in your work?
HH: I first referred to this interior landscape in my notebooks as “mountains.” I eventually wanted to make projects where my body, and the bodies of those I love, could take on the scale of a mountain. But I didn’t know how. My mother went back to China around this time, and she sent me images of letters I had written to my grandfather, which he had collected and kept in a box until his passing. After seeing them, I remembered that although the body may be deeply personal, it is not singular. Through language, we accrue and hold disparate sections and parts. The mountain is an accumulation of fragments, just as the cosmos and human consciousness are collections of fragments. This is where the idea of a schematic, collection, and/or archive comes from.
As I worked in the gallery, I began to consider myself in relation to multiplicity and subjectivity. I am a collection of material. In me, I hold love and pain, myself and my lineage, histories, and recollections.
Hong Hong’s work was on view in “A Trick of Light or Distance” at Brandeis University’s Kniznick Gallery through July 18, 2024.
