Hong Hong: The Past Does Not Need You, But It Borrows Your Mouth

DiverseWorks is commissioning a new multi-disciplinary project by Hong Hong. This work considers the formation of geography in relation to poetry, the acquisition and loss of language, and performance.

ARTIST BIO:

Born in Hefei, Anhui, China, Hong Hong works with image-making and language through repetition, disruption, movement, accumulation, limitation, translation, evaporation, and dispersion. She considers the materiality of the body, the histories of craft, the semiotics of poetry as well as the field of painting in relation to identity, memory, nations, and land. Hong’s practice centers the creation and preservation of a Chinese-American subjectivity rooted in largeness, multiplicity, opacity, self-definition, and self-determination.

Hong Hong is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2025), Chiaro Award in Painting at Headlands Center for the Arts (2025), Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2024 – 2026), United States Artists Fellowship in Craft (2023), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Painting (2023), Carnegie Foundation Fellowship at MacDowell (2020), Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center (2019), and Artistic Excellence Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of Arts (2019). She has participated in residencies at McColl Center for Art + Innovation (2022), Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2020 – 2021), Yaddo (2019), and I-Park (2018).

Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Oklahoma Contemporary (Oklahoma City, OK), Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (New York, NY), Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME), NXTHVN (New Haven, CT), Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg, MA), Tephra Institute for Contemporary Art (Reston, VA), San Francisco Center for Book Arts (San Francisco, CA), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA), Akron Art Museum (Akron, OH), Asia Society Texas Center (Houston, TX), and University of Texas at Dallas (Dallas, TX), among others.