It would be simplistic to call Jungil Hong’s “The Time Being” a retrospective; the artworks span both time and media, from silk screens to ceramics and textiles all made between 2007 and 2024. But rather than a linear reflection of Hong’s well-established career, the works each function for her as portals to past, present, and future. In the way that fractals are visual moments of a much larger pattern while also containing that whole, infinite pattern, “The Time Being” offers up exciting resonance within and between the works, embodying Hong’s ever-evolving practice.
Born in Seoul, Korea, Hong moved to Providence in 1995 for her BFA in ceramics at RISD. In the time since, her graphic style and psychedelic color palettes have become familiar and beloved in the city’s artistic landscape. Hong’s pictorial style is dense yet fluid. She embraces texture and contrast by juxtaposing abstracted patterns with flowers, birds, and figures or alternating acidically vibrant colors. Of course one of the side-effects of being pivotal to scene-defining communities and moments in Providence’s art history is getting saddled with just that label, which can feel flattening after twenty years. “The Time Being” has been a chance for Hong to reflect on and recontextualize her work.
When I met curator Kate McNamara at ODD-KIN for a walkthrough of “The Time Being,” Hong was there. The artist, seated on the floor with a visitor, spread out beautiful jacquard-woven blankets, silk screened shirts, and an array of more recent and some now “vintage” posters and prints, including advertisements for the first farmer’s market in Providence’s West End Armory. I noted that the gallery’s open, longitudinal space lends itself well to the internal conversations among Hong’s works. At the far ends of the space, weavings morph into dimensional installations, some of which solidify into geometrically framed sculptures. Prints and photographs line the rest of the walls, their scale balanced by a central tableau of tiny objects that invites a lean-in kind of looking.
Her earliest work on view, Between Saint Souci and the Setting Sun (2007), is a jigsaw of screen printed and collaged panels that coalesce in a monumental eye. Something between a surrealist landscape and a narrative scene, the work’s internal tension is generated by contrasts. The roiling composition circulates my attention around the touchpoints between land, sky, and sea, populated by mutated birds, hybrid creatures, and portraits based on likenesses of Hong’s family. Made for the 2007 deCordova New England Biennial, Setting Sun embodies the textures and iconographies familiar to her work, but is also evidence of the constraints of the labor of art-making.
Though references to gender, race, and immigration are visible in the imagery of her early works, Hong remarks that it is relatively recently that she’s self-consciously re-examining her processes through these now more prevalent discourses. One of the major themes that is woven through each work, perceived newly through these lenses, is physical labor. Hong notes that she worked in the puzzle-like format of Setting Sun so that she could make monumental pieces while still being able to fit them in her car. As a young woman artist, she very much felt she had to be able to take care of everything herself.
Jacquard textiles made during her 2015 MFA in textiles (RISD) are reworked as sculptural installations. In determining how best to display Hong’s varied body of work, McNamara and Hong settled on this technique for her textiles. McNamara remarks how the metric of Hong’s physical body is in each of the wall hangings: they can be spread only as far as her wingspan, and then shifted, scrunched, and pinned to the wall as indexes of Hong’s movements through space and time. Other weavings are stretched or laid over geometric frames, taking form as a tube, a triangular tunnel, and a draped undulation. Their playful colors and unexpected shine of metallic threads complement the densely worked surfaces. She doubles down on the layered meanings of the laborious process of jacquard weaving in Bit Map (2015). The binary code embedded in the black and white weave is accompanied by a cassette tape that plays the mechanical audio of the massive loom producing the work. In Hong’s conception, the sound could be re-translated into code that programs a new weave pattern—an invitation to explore endless (mis)translations between the textures of the sonic, visual, and physical.
Hong’s most recent work emerges from this liminal space between body, physical process, and image. Her 2024 self-portrait series is the product of mistakes: the inkjet prints of low-res cell phone photos of photographs—cropped photos of her hands, childhood portraits, and other glimpses of herself—that have been reworked and collaged are full of visual glitches. When first printing these photographs, Hong accidentally loaded the photo paper backwards, resulting in a poor image that “simultaneously looks forward and backwards, embodying a transition into something new altogether.” Here, the trace of labor (including its mistakes) makes the image; the glitches evoke the fallacy of memory and the gap between who we are and how we’re seen.
In the center of the gallery, Dinner Table (2024) is installed in the style of Korean low dining tables. Its massive surface acts as an altar laden with found and crafted objects from Hong’s life and practice, including some made by her mother. Reflecting on her upbringing and the value of labor that was instilled in her from a young age, Hong says she always needs some kind of handiwork to keep busy. Knowing this, I see how Hong animates the objects, working them with her hands. The table holds a carefully curated selection of rocks and feathers, an expired driver’s license, Barbie doll heads re-cast “with eyes more like mine,” vertebrae disarticulated and reconfigured into new creatures, lengths of delicately knotted hair: each are nourishment in the creative life of an artist.
“The Time Being” is such a rich title for an exhibition revisiting Hong’s career at this moment. When I asked about it, Hong passed along the thirteenth-century Zen master Eihei Dōgen’s descriptions of being-time, wherein each moment is all being; each moment is the entire world. Yet she also quipped, “not everything is that deep,” citing another inspiration for the title—the children’s book character Ramona Quimby who’s often confused over “grown-ups’” perpetual offerings of “for the time being.” For me, the title brings up the writing of Zen priest and author Ruth Ozeki. Ozeki begins her book The Face: A Time Code with an instruction not from her Buddhist teachers, but from an art historian. In her preface, Ozeki cites Professor Jennifer L. Roberts’s assignment to meditate on her reflections—to sit with a painting for three hours, to really see it. In “The Time Being,” Hong has understood the assignment.
The whole exhibition offers itself up as a fractal to meditate upon. The physical presentation of a collection of moments, each one contains a whole world from our shared past, each one a whole world of future possibility. The exhibition is an incredibly generous view into Hong’s practice of the last twenty years, looking forward just as much as it looks back. She demonstrates so clearly how as Time-Beings, we are constantly in the process of being reconfigured, recontoured, and reworked.
“Jungil Hong: The Time Being” is on view at ODD-KIN, 89 Valley Street, East Providence, RI 02914 through July 21, 2024.
