If You Lived Here largely focuses on landscapes—always presented with a soft touch, but sometimes flourished with long lines of
paint drips—which is a shift from the figurative drawings that defined Hong’s early career. Among her accolades, Hong received
the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2006, while Takashi Murakami picked her in 2008 as the first American to have a solo
exhibition at Japan’s reputed KaiKai Kiki gallery.
New pieces like Drought Tolerance, Sea Level, and Continental Drift even suggest a strain of environmentalism—perhaps spurred
by a mother’s concerns over climate change impacting her daughter’s future? She nods. “I like that theory.”
For her landscapes, Hong sometimes works on regular canvases, but other times she opts for wood. “With raw wood surfaces, I’ll
look at the wood grain and see water swirls and land masses, so some of the elements are already there,” she says.
Hong, ever resourceful and experimental, also peels layers of paint from canvases, cuts them into pieces, and pastes them onto
new canvases. She says the idea came to her when she was a kid, peeling layers of sunburned skin off her arms. “Jackson Pollock
worked this way, too,” Hong points out. “His pieces look like total chaos, but he deliberately cut out parts of larger pieces that he
then put on the canvas. I like having the energy of splatter or scrubs from another surface.”
The abstract nature of Hong’s landscapes and collages stands in contrast to her lettered pieces, which scream messages like “Oh
It’s You! Oh, It’s You” (from Punctuation Is Everything) and “If You Lived Here I’d Be Home by Now.” The messages are more clear
in the lettered pieces, which Hong says are based on song lyrics: “The Way We Fall” and “One in the Morning” were inspired,
respectively, by Yo La Tengo and longtime friend Sara Lov. The latter artist is a singer/songwriter who performed at “In This
Together,” a night of art, music, and film that Hong curated at FLOOD’s Los Angeles gallery. The event—intended to celebrate
the city’s diverse art community—also featured works by Broken Social Scene co-founder Kevin Drew, who is friends with Hong’s
partner, Paul Watling.
Hong says Watling—an artist, director, and animator—will play an integral role in her next project, in which she plans to take
photos of Los Angeles building facades and use their layered logos as collages. “I love the geometric nature and the unintentional
beauty of paint swatches on buildings here in Los Angeles,” she muses. “LA will always be my touchstone.”
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