Upon graduating from California State University, Long Beach, with a B.A. in art, Hong entered the professional world as a
teacher. After delving into production work on a variety of animated TV series—including Nickelodeon’s My Life as a Teenage
Robot, for which she won an Emmy—she gave birth to a child of her own, Tigerlily, in 2002. “I was huge when I was pregnant,” she
recalls. “We were working on our house at the time, and I was sleeping on an air mattress and deflating it every night, I was so big.”
Hong’s love for her daughter, now a teenager, is unwavering, and she fluidly weaves the topic of motherhood into responses about
her life and career. Tigerlily sometimes serves as a model for some of Hong’s paintings and collages, which often incorporate
found materials or consist of large lettered phrases.
But while Hong is a devoted mother, her artwork hasn’t lost its childlike magic and playful qualities. Her latest series of acrylics,
If You Lived Here I’d Be Home by Now, toys with a limitless array of colors (she collects paint chips from a local hardware store) and
animals. When humans are featured, they’re usually faceless specks subsumed by sublime surroundings.
One particularly amusing painting, A Sunny Place for Shady People, features a group of tourists gazing through binoculars but
unaware of a zebra standing nearby. Another, World Without End, largely consists of a pale-colored sky, but in the corner one can
spy a group of people climbing a ladder up a rock.
38
FLOOD