Julia Elise Hong

juliaelisehong@gmail.com
@theirjulia

Recent and Ongoing

2026
Publication Color This, featured drawing, Something Different, London, United Kingdom
Curatorial, Galerie Papillote, itinerant

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

2024
Group exhibition Tide Pools, Nous-ance at TRYST by the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, California
Group exhibition Play It as It Lays, de boer, Los Angeles, California
Publication “Reading Marx”, em-dash, Issue 2: Youth, May 10
Group exhibition Vague Domains, Alt Projects, Arcadia, California
Group exhibition At Home, IKEA residency at Surely Work Studios, Los Angeles, California
Group exhibition Greater Los Angeles MFA, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, California
Curatorial, Sprague Gallery at Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California

2023
Group exhibition Daydream Jelly, la BEAST gallery, Los Angeles, California
Group exhibition MFA Thesis Exhibition, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California
Solo exhibition Long Day, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, 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

b. 1985, South Korea

Full CV

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 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. More specifically in painting, each image 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 opaque and transparent, hidden and perceptible, natural and decorative, dark and bright, and distant and near. The images 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 and at the same time missing or delayed, therefore forever to come and forever contemporary. By thinking about a double bind, I am also thinking about painting.

*What is a painting? And what does a painting do? For me, a painting is a world, and a painting transforms 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 where they are essential and at the same time social in countless ways. In other words, a painting is a chance at believing.

The melancholic quality is heightened through themes of isolation, love, and mimicry, and through the material flatness of the paintings and, in the case of my writings, the written words.

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)