Julia Elise Hong

juliaelisehong@gmail.com
@theirjulia

Recent and Ongoing

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 at Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California

Education

2023 MFA, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California
2014 MFA, Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), Oslo, Norway
2010 MA, Columbia University, New York, New York

A world is the subject forever suspended in opaque luminosity.

In summary, my images of figures are really images of subjectivity and relations in a double bind. I pay attention to conjunctions of the essence of the singular subject and its social reality: what is felt to be a true image of the thing and discourses in which the thing is invested; subjective and objective; affect and language; sensibility and information; discretion and expression; and the unknowable and the known. A double bind then also contains time in that the figure or the image is always here and at the same time missing or to come. It is a world full of tensions and confusions.* By thinking about a double bind, I am also thinking about painting.

*A world which is a double bind calls for negotiation and vulnerability, for problems within it can never be resolved. Only, I pursue through each work an ontological argument for the existence of a singular being in immanent possibilities. What enables the subject to exist in ‘immanent possibilities’ is the power of vagueness produced by and contained in a double bind, which is precisely the reason I cannot give up language, the thing’s opaque, social appearance despite my tendency toward affect and realization. Plus, appearance is unequivocally linked to the ontology of the thing and not apart from it: in my opinion, any appearance is our chance at believing that a thing exists at all and that a thing ‘is’ many things including ‘social’—knowing, maybe not, but a chance at believing, yes. It is in a double bind then that we can experience an epistemic shift toward deterritorialization. In other words, we would have the chance to rethink our notion of subjectivity and get to know that we, each of us a singular being, are essential and at the same time social in countless ways; and we would each be an active participant in regaining our human being in the contemporary world and not a passive consumer of given discourses.

This statement put differently:

Alien (2025)
Today (2025)
Reading Marx: History of a Young Artist in Marxist Terms (2023/2024)
Long Day (2023)
An Impromptu Essay on Love in Postmodernity (2022)
How Beautiful, the Lullaby, the Vain, the March of Lightness (2014)