Disjunction and Other Works: Ming Ying Hong

August 29 - October 3, 2019

Ming Ying Hong is an interdisciplinary artist based in Starkville, Mississippi. She has exhibited throughout the United States in spaces such as the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis and the Ice Box Gallery in Philadelphia. Her work has been featured in many publications—most recently, in MANIFEST Gallery’s International Drawing Annual 11. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University. 

Hong’s work explores the limits of our knowledge and experience by questioning the way we define and categorize states of being. Bodily forms are depicted as masculine and feminine, dead and alive, aggressive and delicate. Explosions, another common motif, teeter on the razor thin edge of dissolution and whole. By combining these seemingly contradictory elements together, opposites which once defined each other overlap, ultimately dismantling the system in which one definition is privileged over another. Masculinity no longer prevails over the feminine; strength no longer prevails over the delicate; and stability no longer prevails over the broken. Instead, the work encourages us to examine the in-between spaces of these binaries—the spaces that fall outside of our clear-cut definitions and hierarchies. In examining these areas of uncertainty, a more complex spectrum of experience emerges.