For the past seven years, Hong Hong (she/her) has travelled across the US to create site-responsive, monumental paperworks. In this nomadic practice, Hong’s traditional methods of Chinese papermaking merge with concepts of painting, monastic rituals, and feminist performances. Her research investigates the voyages of bodies, both plant and human, across borders and in time. Interested in relationships, her recent projects map connections between globalization, climate, exile, time-passing, and the Chinese Diaspora through cartographic, symbolic, and material languages.
“Each summer, I go outside to make paper beneath the sky. The sky is a circle: its center is everywhere. In a few of my memories, this sky is hollower, bluer, and more resonant. In other memories, it is darker and heavier, like a net of stones. Sometimes the sky is beautiful because I am sad. And other times, the sky is beautiful because it begins at the edge of every hill and the end of each street.
When I make paper, I often think about time and about painting. Time is inside and outside: it is the container and the contained. We carry time and we are carried by time. The difference between eternity and this moment is not always easily discernible to me. Someone I don’t know well once wrote that sometimes the parts can be more essential than the whole.” – Hong Hong