Julia Elise Hong
Artist Statement (2025/2026)
200 wordsI am a painter working in oil on canvas. My practice is grounded in the belief that art has the power to realize a world and, through its existence in possibilities, transform the world as it is experienced by the artist and the viewer. I articulate this through figurative painting, constructing 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, opaque and transparent, 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 the melancholic quality of my work as a site of continual negotiation where the subject can exist in imminent possibilities and notions of subjectivity can be rethought. This quality is heightened through themes of isolation, love, and mimicry, and through the material flatness of the paintings.