Julia Elise Hong
juliaelisehong@gmail.com
@theirjulia
2026
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
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
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. 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. The melancholic quality is heightened through the material flatness of the paintings and, in the case of my writings, written words.
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)