Each summer, interdisciplinary artist Hong Hong travels to faraway and distinct locations to make paper under the sky. These environmental investigations map interstitial relationships between landscape, temporality, and the body through cartographic, symbolic, and material languages. Born in Hefei, Anhui, China, Hong currently lives in Massachusetts.

to wake, to walk a distance, no speaking, darkness, unravel, open, walk around, accumulate, submerge, stir, bend at waist, lift, wetness, weight, to pour, to spill, to turn, to lower, to empty, to walk back, to reach, to lose balance, some light, a few birds, squat, touch, pinch, push, lean, the sky, the ground, to walk again, to accumulate again, to submerge again, to lower again, to pour again, to spill again, to empty again, to lose balance again, the sun burns, feel for thinness with fingers, press against thickness with palms, to empty one last time, to gather, to sweep, to turn away, and then to return

The process begins outside, in darkness, as movement. It is physical. I cannot see, but I remember.

December 2021, in notebook: My dad took out several large bags from the back of his closet. I opened one. It was filled with hundreds of bracelets, each made of knotted paracord and then carefully wrapped in layers of red embroidery thread. No one knew he was doing this. Not my mom. Not his own mother. He told me that he made the bracelets in the early morning, before the sun rose. He couldn’t see as well as he once did, but his body knew the necessary movements: where to tighten and then loosen, when to turn and in which direction. I am just like my father.

November 2023, in an email: the same sequence of movements are repeated. but the gestures are like memories in that they are not static. they transform each time i revisit them. something new is born. i go back to the past in order to connect more fully to the present and the future.

I enter into time.

—Hong Hong

honghong.studio | @honghongstudio