HONG HAO

In Hong’s latest undertaking Light, there is something blithe about coming across chunks of many coloured bricks in different sizes. It adds to the sense of playfulness when these seemingly random sizes suggest specific everyday fabrics like towels, sweaters, rugs, and carpets, some of which are culled from Hong’s used household goods. The surprisingly great variety of purposes implied in the abstract forms coalesce the useful and the useless. Light embodies sensually a welter of contradictions: hard and soft, smooth and textured, reflective and light-absorbent sensually. Above all, perhaps, it seems beyond imagination that in Hong’s hands, the new body of work utilises the devices of sanding and buffing on a delicate and fragile textile surface.

Throughout his oeuvre, Hong always shows a keen interest in appropriating seemingly farfetched approaches to upset the form and medium in an absurd way. In the Selected Script and Catalogue & Oahgnoh series, he compiles his whimsical fabrications in the forms of the classical anthology and institutional catalog; in the My Things and Bottom series, he takes records of three dimensional objects and, more ironically their bottoms, with a scanner that is adept in details only at a close distance; in the As It Is series, he traces unattended words like those in sales receipts as if transcribing the scriptures; and in the Realm of Matters series, he scribes modern colloquial expressions on ancient ceramic fragments. Tampering with these perplexing mismatches, Hong’s work unravels the ways of seeing, perceiving, and knowing integral to the form and medium.

For Hong, form, on the one hand, is the condition of knowing. On the other hand, forms imply different ways of knowing that draw the line between different realms of knowledge: “There are no such lines in nature; they are configured by man [...]. The lines are not essentially self-sustained. They are conditioned and thus, ephemeral.” The configuration and deconfiguration of lines are at the core of Light in which a landscape of manufactured and everyday features between interlacing ingrain yarns transforms into a tableau brimming with dispositional traits of the seemingly symbolic and expressive compositions and brushwork. Between the figural and the abstract, object and representation, lies the relentless repetition of sanding the ridges and filling out the minute hollows. Appearing as a painstaking and meditative process of tracing the countless grains in Light, Hong’s practice is always to subvert in the way “as it is,” to transcend. From the grained and textured self to the reflected light and shadow, Light showcases Hong Hao’s constant pursuit of “no difference” that transcends “different ways of knowing.”

Hong Hao was born in 1965 in Beijing, China. He graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (China) in 1989. The artist currently lives and works in Beijing. As one of the important figures in the development of Chinese Contemporary art, Hong’s artistic exploration has always been closely related to the transformations. The artist’s creative works span photography, painting, installation and performance. Through reconstructing the world map and scanning the bottom of daily consumer goods since the early 1990s, Hong has made his unique response to various phenomena and problems against the backdrop of rapid material and capital accumulation in China. The scanned images are rearranged according to their forms and colours, which brings a new way of understanding objects and contemporary life. Delving into the idea of representation, Hong’s work impresses the viewers with the multiplicity of a deliberately undifferentiated, flattened, and superficial world.

His solo exhibitions were held at the Museum of Modern Art Bologna (Italy), Beijing Commune (Beijing), Pace Gallery (Hong Kong and Beijing), Arles International Photography Festival (France) and etc. His works have been exhibited at the West Bund Museum (Shanghai), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), the Power Station of Art (Shanghai), the Red Brick Art Museum (Beijing), and the Minsheng Museum of Art (Beijing), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou), Queensland Art Gallery(Australia), National Museum of Modern Art (Seoul). His works have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the British Museum (UK), the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Asian Art Museum (Fukuoka), J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Queensland Art Gallery (Australia), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong) and other institutional collections. Hong Hao received the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in 2000 and 2006, and Martell Artists of the Year in 2013.