Hong Hong likes to start working on her art very early in the morning. “The city is between being asleep and being awake. So am I. I feel as if everything is a dream,” she says.
By the time the sun comes up and is high in the sky, Hong needs its help with her work. “As they move from wet to dry, light is essential to their creation. Without the sun it wouldn’t work.” she says.
So the paper artist based in Hartford named her show at Real Art Ways “All the Light in a Vivid Dream.”
Hong was born in Hefei, China, and emigrated with her parents to the United States. She got a BFA from State University of New York at Potsdam and an MFA from the University of Georgia. She created the seven artworks in the exhibit when she was an artist in residence at Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory & Educational Foundation in Cleveland.
Hong begins with the inner bark of a paper mulberry tree. She soaks it in water and then cooks it with soda ash. She beats the cooked fiber with a mallet until it separates into individual fibers, then she colors the fibers with dye and water. Each artwork is composed of several layers of variously colored papers made with those fibers. The repetitive processes, she says “provide cadence to my perception of existence.”
Hong emphasized that her process is as dependent on the sunshine and the water as it is on her.
“It’s a natural interaction between the water and the fiber. It’s about how the water carries the fiber, how it flows,” she said. “It’s the momentary interaction between the force of my body and the direction of the water.”
She works with a palette primarily centering on blue and pink, inspired by a a sunset she once watched over Lake Erie in Cleveland. “I watched the lake change. It was pink and blue and then deeper blue. It was constantly there but constantly changing,” she says.
But over time, the sun, again, takes over.
“As time goes on, these will fade and come closer to gray. Each has its own lifespan,” she says. “Then I will hose them down and turn them back into my primary materials. Each has its own lifespan.”
That the artworks are impermanent is part of their appeal, she says. “They live in a state of disappearance and reappearance, of absence and presence. I don’t consider any of these to be finished iterations. They’re all something on the way to being something else.”
ALL THE LIGHT IN A VIVID DREAM is at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St. in Hartford, until Oct. 29. realartways.org.
