Julia Elise Hong
juliaelisehong@gmail.com
@theirjulia
2026
Publication Color This, featured drawing, Something Different, London, United Kingdom
Curatorial, Galerie Papillote, itinerant project in development
Writing, Penelop, monthly publication in development
2025
Group exhibition Haystacks, CABIN and New York Life Gallery, New York, New York
Residency, CABIN, Potsdam, New York
Solo exhibition Today, de boer, Los Angeles, California
Curatorial, Sprague Gallery, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California
CV
A world is the subject forever suspended in opaque luminosity.
I am a painter working in oil on canvas and with interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary interests in other artistic mediums as well as writing and philosophy. Grounded in a pursuit of regaining the human being in the contemporary world, I treat my painting as a methodology for research and for an ontological argument for the existence of each subject in imminent possibilities. This tends to result in more formal diversity and less a mastery of a single style or aesthetic, which I hope will remain a characteristic of my work.
While styles and subject matters vary, what a painting is remains the same: a world in a double bind. Each painting is an invention of a landscape and a mise-en-scène in which forms, figures, and compositions operate as forces caught in a conjunction of contrasts such as subjective and objective, discrete and expressive, hidden and perceptible, natural and decorative, distant and near, and, more fundamentally, essential and social. The paintings then offer a clear view of what is unclear, an effect akin to a foreign language, and, with it, the complexity of time: the subject appears present while simultaneously missing or delayed, therefore forever to come and forever contemporary. I am drawn to this melancholic quality of my work as a site of continual negotiation, and this quality is heightened through themes of isolation, expectation, and mimicry, and through the material flatness of the paintings.
For these reasons my paintings tend to be figurative, less for the sake of figurative painting as a genre and more for the purpose of articulating a world in a double bind where the subject continues to be invested in a social layer. In this way my work is abstract.
Notes on the underlined:
What is a painting? And what can a painting do? For me, a painting is a world in a double bind, and a painting can do many things including transforming the world as it is experienced by the artist and the viewer. A world which is a double bind is full of tensions and confusions and calls for negotiation and vulnerability. Problems within it can never be resolved. Only, through the melancholic quality of my work and the power of vagueness produced by and contained in a double bind, I pursue an ontological argument for the existence of a singular being in immanent possibilities: realizing and believing that a thing and a world exist at all and in possibilities. In other words, a painting is a chance at believing.
Put differently—this section is currently being updated:
Wing/Bisang (2025, 2026–)
Weather (2025, 2026–)
Alien (2025)
A Dark Island in the Hellenic Sea (2025)
Today (2025)
Reading Marx: History of a Young Artist in Marxist Terms (2023/2024)
K in His Youth and Age (2023)
Long Day (2023)
A Still Moving Image of B (2023)
Catch (2023)
An Impromptu Essay on Love in Postmodernity (2022)
Last Else (2022)
Clays and Wax (2021-2022)
A Duck Walk into the Forest (2021)
Twins (2021)
Sleep in Three Notations (2020)
Exposure (2015/2020)
Shakespearean Pansies (2020)
In the Days of L and I (2018)
Studio Assistant (2016)
Angel (2016)
A Bouquet for Opera (2016)
A Five-Minute Term (2015)
From across the Lake (2015)
Pillows (2013, 2015)
Prismatic (2015)
A Butterfly’s Tales (2014)
As Boy Awoke to Tell (in the Feel of Spring) (2014)
How Beautiful, the Lullaby, the Vain, the March of Lightness (2014)
Neck Arrangement (2014)
Afghan Hound (2013)
Lac Rose (2013)
Tracing Scenarios and Writing to Schubert (2013)
Maria (2013)
Eleven Days in May, Heaven (2013)
A Triangular Spiral (2012)
Subject-Subject (2012)
Ode to Smoked Salmon Benedict (2012)
A Bookcase to be Hung Low (2012)
Baby (2012)
Rose for Debussy (2012)
Life without a Hat (2011)
Oscillation (2011)
The Reclining Figure (2011)