Beijing Commune is thrilled to present Hong Hao's solo exhibition “Light”, opening on 12 Dec 2024. Featuring the artist’s latest body of work Light and a selection of his early and recent works, the presentation showcases Hong’s unremitting exploration of the relationship between the subject and daily objects, ways of perceiving and knowing, and ideas of boundary, realm, and the transcendent.
In Hong’s latest undertaking Light, there is something blithe about coming across chunks of many-colored bricks in different sizes. It adds to the sense of playfulness when these seemingly random sizes suggest specific everyday fabrics like towels, sweaters, rugs, and carpets, some of which are culled from Hong’s used household goods. The surprisingly great variety of purposes implied in the abstract forms coalesce the useful and the useless. Light embodies sensually a welter of contradictions: hard and soft, smooth and textured, reflective and light-absorbent sensually. Above all, perhaps, it seems beyond imagination that in Hong’s hands, the new body of work utilizes the devices of sanding and buffing on a delicate and fragile textile surface.
Throughout his oeuvre, Hong always shows a keen interest in appropriating seemingly farfetched approaches to upset the form and medium in an absurd way. In the Selected Script and Catalogue & Oahgnoh series, he compiles his whimsical fabrications in the forms of the classical anthology and institutional catalog; in the My Things and Bottom series, he takes records of three-dimensional objects and, more ironically their bottoms, with a scanner that is adept in details only at a close distance; in the As It Is series, he traces unattended words like those in sales receipts as if transcribing the scriptures; and in the Realm of Matters series, he scribes modern colloquial expressions on ancient ceramic fragments. Tampering with these perplexing mismatches, Hong’s work unravels the ways of seeing, perceiving, and knowing integral to the form and medium.
For Hong, form, on the one hand, is the condition of knowing. On the other hand, forms imply different ways of knowing that draw the line between different realms of knowledge: “There are no such lines in nature; they are configured by man […]. The lines are not essentially self-sustained. They are conditioned and thus, ephemeral.” The configuration and deconfiguration of lines are at the core of Light in which a landscape of manufactured and everyday features between interlacing ingrain yarns transforms into a tableau brimming with dispositional traits of the seemingly symbolic and expressive compositions and brushwork. Between the figural and the abstract, object and representation, lies the relentless repetition of sanding the ridges and filling out the minute hollows. Appearing as a painstaking and meditative process of tracing the countless grains in Light, Hong’s practice is always to subvert in the way “as it is,” to transcend. From the grained and textured self to the reflected light and shadow, Light showcases Hong Hao’s constant pursuit of “no difference” that transcends “different ways of knowing.”
