Holly Wong: Mending Body / Mending Mind

This book features a mid-career survey of the art practice of Holly Wong. It includes essays by Elizabeth Wiet and Mira Dayal, as well as poems by Aya Karpińska. Book design by Bryce Wilner.

Holly Wong

Mending Body/ Mending Mind

Holly Wong

pp. 1–2: Al Wong and Holly Wong, stills from two-channel video included in Mending Body/Mending Mind , 2024, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.

Mending Body/Mending Mind

Edited by Elizabeth Wiet

Artist Statement

Holly Wong

Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology

Elizabeth Wiet

transform/death

Aya Karpin´ska

Following the Lines

Mira Dayal

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Artist Statement

Holly Wong

I create fiber installations and painted collages on shaped aluminum that explore healing and resilience.

In my fiber practice, I became attracted to working with lightweight, transparent fabrics because they reminded me of the permeable boundary between the living and the dead. To assemble these works, I use a flat-felled seam technique and fluid machine sewing to join materials such as organza, tulle, and donated antique lace. I combine these ephemeral materials with LED strip lighting, video, sound, and diffusion film. The intent of my fiber practice is to reveal traumatic memory through the fragmentation of my materials, while also exploring the potential for healing embedded in the physical process of sewing. My collaged works are layered drawings and paintings that form densely nested worlds of pattern. I start initially with drawing, often basing my images on medical or crime scene photography to explore the notion of the wound. Layers of color and the fluidity of ink mediums produce an organic overlay, enabling nature to reclaim and grow over the pain, producing a beautiful scar. Earlier bodies of work combined my initial training as a painter with my graduate education focused on installation and performance art. As a young artist, I experimented with a variety of materials to exorcise the traumatic flashbacks that I was experiencing. My approaches spanned a range of feminist actions and expressions in figuration, ultimately culminating in my practice in soft sculpture. My current work is situated in the Pattern and Decoration movement, second-wave feminism, and the California Light and Space movement, as well as the rich alternative history of quilt making and craft. I am driven to memorialize my mother, whom I lost to alcoholism and domestic violence, and to help

provide a healing space for people who face violence without recourse. I draw and sew as a journey toward wholeness, both for myself and for my mother’s memory. I seek to reclaim the female body and bear witness to the spirit by emphasizing the vibrancy of pattern and flow, the softness of the fabric, and the enduring presence of light. Creating works of beauty in brokenness is my highest form of resistance.

Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology

Elizabeth Wiet

Holly Wong

There is no more famous ghost than Shakespeare’s King Hamlet. The denizens of Denmark are not quite afraid of him— but he does stoke their ire. Each night, they impatiently await his reappearance. With paranoid zeal, they interrogate his reasons for stalking their rotten state: “I charge thee, speak!,” demands Horatio. 1 They enlist the help of the King’s surviving son, Prince Hamlet, who avows to avenge his father’s death in order to exorcise his ghost. Banishment can be the ghost’s only fate. Holly Wong, on the other hand, is not afraid of ghosts. Perhaps she once was. But her most recent work demonstrates a decisive gesture to engage—to entangle—with the spirit world. The “Shadow Body” series (2019–2023) gives physical form, through layers of diaphanous tulle, to her late mother’s spirit. Room-sized installations such as Body of Light (2023) and Guardian of the Spirits (2022) envelop the viewer with thousands of fabric scraps that have been stitched together, creating makeshift enclosures under which the living and the dead can dwell together and mutually heal. Wong and her mother certainly had much that required healing. In interviews, the artist recalls having come home one day to find the walls of her childhood home shot through with bullet holes, the consequence of her father’s drug dealing. Her mother, an unstable presence in her life, died prematurely of alcoholism and domestic violence when Wong was still a teenager. Unlike Marcellus, Horatio, and the rest of Hamlet ’s ilk, Wong does not seek to banish the ghost. Rather, her work evinces a desire to live with the ghost, to embrace that which remains as a virtuality even as it is physically no longer. I borrow this language from the theorist Mark Fisher, who borrows a term from another theorist—the late Jacques Derrida—to illuminate how, and why, certain artworks are haunted by past forms. Hauntology is a neologism: a combination of haunting and ontology, the metaphysics of being. As with Derrida before him, Fisher is particularly interested in the reflexive temporality of the ghost—in its ability to come to us as if from the future, as well

1 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark , ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 11.

Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology

Installation view of Holly Wong, Mending Body/Mending Mind , 2024, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photographs by Matthew Sherman.

Elizabeth Wiet

Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology

as the past. Art that bears the past’s residues is often nostalgic for what Fisher calls “lost futures,” for the utopias we once believed in, once strived for, until they were foreclosed by capitalism, sexism, racism, and other structural violences. A kind of ethical persistence sits at the heart of hauntology. “It is about refusing to give up the ghost,” Fisher writes, “or— and this can sometimes amount to the same thing—the refusal of the ghost to give up on us.” 2 Capitalism and sexism push us toward resignation: they breed by making us believe that there simply is no other way to be. But by refusing to give up on the ghost, we open up possibilities assumed to be precluded. Fisher never directly invokes the writing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in his work, and I believe the inverse is true for her as well. But her theory of reparative reading, in my eyes, can deepen our understanding of Fisher’s hauntology. Contra the paranoid point of view, which stakes its claim in exposure, the reparative stakes its claim in hope. “Hope,” per Sedgwick, is “often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience.” Yet its energies position us to “realize that the future may be different from the present.” 3 Hope makes it possible for us to entertain “such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.” 4 Much art and writing aims to reveal the various ways society is inhospitably constructed. But for Sedgwick, this work is not enough. With acute sensitivity, she beckons us to collect the fragments left over from this violence in order to build a more just future. This is precisely what Wong does in her multimedia installation Mending Body/Mending Mind (2024). More than any other work in her oeuvre, it reckons with the ghost of her mother. For the first time, Wong explicitly addresses the violent act that she now realizes has haunted her work for over thirty years: her mother’s rape by knifepoint in their Florida home.

2 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Winchester, U.K.: Zer0 Books, 2022), 22. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performa- tivity (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 146. 3

Mending Body/Mending Mind consists of three core components: a multi-panel textile installation, a two-channel video created in collaboration with Wong’s husband, the experimental filmmaker Al Wong, and a speculative poem and sound composition by Aya Karpin´ska. The textile panels, suspended from the ceiling at different angles, greet the viewer when they first enter the room. Fabric squares of varying transparencies and sheens are sewn together to create pieces haunted by domesticity—were they not too lightweight to provide warmth, one might assume they were quilts. Their palette tends toward the pastel, with white being the primary hue. Most of the panels are sliced through the center or marked by other excisions. These cuts enable them to fold and flow, to gently sway as viewers move in and out of the installation. But they are also shaded by violence —for the act of cutting is a destructive one. Al Wong’s videos are projected through the fabric installation. The panels interrupt each image, creating another form of visual slicing. One motif in the video brings this sublimated violence to the fore. A disembodied hand wields metal scissors to cut through a bolt of heavy grey fabric. The fabric is seen in another close-up shot, though this time it is being stitched by a sewing machine. As the needle repeatedly stabs the fabric, it sets a steady tempo like a metronome. Mending Body/Mending Mind privileges the kind of intimacy that close-ups afford. This intimacy is replicated in the sound installation. Karpin´ska’s composition must be heard via headphones connected to a handheld audio player. Speaking in dialogue, she and Wong seem to be whispering directly into the listener’s ear. The poem imagines a conversation between Wong and her mother, whom Karpin´ska ventriloquizes. She speaks in hushed fragments. This is no ordinary hurt . Knife at my throat . In my own home . And yet, the central trauma is never directly named. For all of the ways it attempts to conjure intimacy,

Ibid.

Elizabeth Wiet

Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology

Elizabeth Wiet

Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology

the installation also reveals that distance separated Wong from her mother: the latter was never able to find the language to tell her daughter about her rape. It was only in adulthood that Wong learned of the story from her older sister. Mending Body/Mending Mind is less about naming sexual violence, and more about the secrets that exist between mothers and daughters. The poem is purely fictional, a form of wish fulfillment. It seems intentional that a viewer could easily walk through the installation attending only to its images, never picking up the audio player to listen to its words. In memorializing the dead, we often feel the need to idealize them. But Wong makes no such move. She freely admits that her mother was a complicated figure—while also recognizing that this complexity makes her more, not less, worthy of compassion. Sedgwick compels us to take an “empathetic view of the other as at once good, damaged, integral, and requiring and eliciting love of care.” 5 And this Wong surely does. Following Fisher, she refuses to give up on her mother’s ghost. Karpin´ska’s poem acknowledges the anxiety and shame Wong’s mother must have felt post-trauma. How do you tell your teenage daughter? The question is ultimately rhetorical—she knows she cannot. It is possible that she believed she was protecting her daughter through her chosen silence. Adolescence is a vulnerable period. In a poem deliberately spare, bereft of adjective and color, Karpin´ska’s inclusion of the word “teenage” feels significant. My mind returns to those video motifs. The cutting, the stitching. They are certainly metaphors for bodily harm, analogies for a violence of another sort—the “knife at my throat.” Though obvious, it still bears noting that Wong’s installation was made possible by sewing. Her mother taught her to sew, a biographical fact to which she attributes her turn, in the early 2000s, toward textile. The installation’s suspended panels echo the video’s scenes of disfiguration. Pieces of silk, cotton, and antique lace are sewn together, only to be cut by Wong’s hand. But they also presage a kind of repair. She gathers the scraps

Sedgwick, 137.

Elizabeth Wiet

Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology

and reassembles them into an improvised patchwork that she hopes will envelop her mother’s story, cloaking it in fabric in order to absorb and release her suffering. Wong’s intention is not a simple exorcism: the white hues of the textiles nod to Buddhist mourning rituals surrounding rebirth. Augmenting the scenes of cutting and stitching are close-ups of a woman’s hair being braided. To braid is to take disparate parts and bring them together, transforming them through touch. I think here of my own mother, who braided my hair many mornings before school. Or I think of my father now, who asked me at the age of seventy if I could teach him how to braid—so that he could care for my mother’s hair following her massive stroke.

Shakespeare, 9.

There was a moment in my own genesis as a thinker and writer when I felt compelled to frame every analysis I conducted— of a novel, a performance, or an artwork—with a few choice quotes drawn from critical theory. I no longer feel this way, and instead prefer to approach each artwork I encounter on its own terms. In tending to the threads of Wong’s work, I conjure the words of Fisher and Sedgwick for more personal reasons. They are the ghosts of my life, the writers whose ideas I have lived with and thought alongside for over fifteen years. We lost both of them too soon: Fisher to his own demons, and Sedgwick to a breast cancer that she battled for over a decade. And yet, ghosts have an uncanny knack for lingering—they are revenants as much as apparitions. Perturbed by the persistent intrusions of the king’s ghost, Horatio asks, in Hamlet ’s very first scene, “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” 6 He is none too pleased by the king’s phantasmic endurance. But to the reader of this book, I kindly request: greet the ghost with hospitality. Welcome its presence. Allow the specters that haunt Mending Body/Mending Mind to inform your engagement with the earlier moments in Wong’s oeuvre as

Elizabeth Wiet

Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology

they unfold in the pages that follow. Tune your ear to the book’s repetitious rhythms, focus your eye on the motifs that recur.

Aya Karpin´ska

Wong’s practice, which spans painting, performance, installation, textile, drawing, and photography, is indisputably varied. Not every work in her oeuvre can be assimilated into a grand narrative—into what Sedgwick might call a “strong theory.” Yet, in developing an editorial framework for this book, I have sought to make visible the delicate threads that stitch the disparate elements of Wong’s practice together, treating Mending Body/Mending Mind as an index and lodestar. The first section, “Fragments and Experiments,” explores the varied ways that Wong worked through themes of sexual violence, domestic instability, and trauma in her early practice. The second section, “To Connect and Repair,” presents her pivot toward abstraction, a method that has empowered her to assemble the part-objects of her past into a whole that might offer nourishment and restitution. Mira Dayal’s essay, which surveys Wong’s archive, and Bryce Wilner’s graphic design extend this structure. Line drawings derived from the textiles in Mending Body/Mending Mind undergird the title pages, while stills from Al Wong’s video punctuate the book’s beginning and end, marking time. This book arrives at the midpoint in Wong’s career. Nearly four decades stand behind—we can only hope that several more stand before. As I close out this essay, I think of the words that end the poem for Mending Body/Mending Mind : “I know. I continue.”

I. transform

II. death

i remember, i remember wanting to love you tender as you were

take my silence give it a shape large enough to carry me across

how do you tell your teenage daughter: this is no ordinary hurt how do you tell your teenage daughter: silence was my way to endure

take memory knife at my throat in my own home a knife at my throat take this outrage wrap it in silk repair the holes that it left behind i am still here i am still here in the soft movements of your fingers that hold the hand of terror so i am not alone

but silence is also a kind of lie a beautiful lie to keep intact, to protect

let my voice be here not as sound but as light and shadow:

i know, i continue i know, i continue

and time is no veil to healing in the embrace of this moment

i am yours and you are my celebration

Elizabeth Wiet

Following the Lines

Mira Dayal

Holly Wong’s practice begins with tensions that are as fundamental to canonical painting as they are to contemporary feminist performance art: light and dark, pain and revelation, self and other, mother and child. She weaves these themes together with uncommon materials—including candle smoke, cellophane, tulle, and map pins—to create densely layered yet ethereal compositions. At first glance, her recent works might appear to be largely formal experiments. Take the installation Hydra (2024), composed of individually suspended, molded acrylic shapes to which Wong has applied waving stripes of colored pencil and graphite. The piece evokes a festival of kites or a flock of birds in strong winds, while also suggesting a spatialized painting. It appears vibrant, peaceful, light. But Wong’s work is also a kind of camouflage. The specific patterns within a piece function as compressed swatches of a larger context that can be too complicated to hold, or too painful to explain, at one time. To see that wider forest of meaning requires digging into Wong’s archive. Wong’s earliest paintings and drawings, completed during high school in the 1980s, are largely high-contrast black-and- white or sepia-toned compositions with titles like Lace (1987), Voice (1988), and Triangle Sun (1987), as well as Maternal Corpse (1987) and Female Christ (1988). The latter two oils resemble cropped Chaïm Soutine paintings of meat. In her BFA and MFA studies at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1990s, Wong turned to themes of labor, cleansing, and evidence. Her film installation Trace (1991) shows bubbling suds sliding over tiles under orange-hued light as the artist washes dishes in the industrial sink of her art school, where she held a job as a janitor. Another project from that year was a performance documented in the school’s maintenance closet, where we see the artist’s handprint backlit in a dirty window. Violence seeped in, too. In 1992, to create several performance pieces and standalone works, Wong stained found children’s clothing and blankets with cherry pie filling, recalling smears of

Following the Lines

blood. Wong describes one of these works as a metaphor for the “loss of innocence,” though not necessarily her own. A darker brutality seeps into this body of work via a birthday cake sitting atop blankets that Wong writes she had “cut up and decimated” in a performance. In a contemporaneous work, Crevice (1992), Wong took on the role of a detective, spending “several hours inspecting the crevices in a paneled wood wall at the San Francisco Art Institute” and listening to any sounds emanating from those gaps. Though these pieces do not all relay specific narratives, they read as excerpts of an autobiography centered on bold and vulnerable confrontations with trauma. The artist emerges as a witness to events that cannot quite be named. After completing her graduate studies, Wong addressed similar themes in a softer, more abstract mode. Her color photographs of the late 1990s depict halos, shadows, refractions, and the spotlit corner of a room. Their titles read as an outlined process of recovery: Altar , Absence , Mother , Presence , Recall , Recognition , Transformation (all 1997). Then, in the following decade, Wong created an outpouring of more specific representations of violence, through paintings and drawings that bear a high-contrast representational style reminiscent of her earliest work. Depicting refugees, detainees, war victims, and other people in conditions of instability and unrest, they suggest a subconscious effort to locate her story in relation to others. Wong began weaving together these bodies of work, these many harmed bodies, in the 2010s, with sculptural pieces such as Gathering (2014), Float (2014), Constellation (2017), and Recollection (2017), all made of materials used to anchor, contain, repair, and connect: thread, gauze, plastic bags, yarn, rope. Recalling the spatialized drawings of Gego or the materially inventive suspensions of Eva Hesse, these fiber installations are hung on the wall or from the ceiling, arranged in three dimensions to occupy space as cobweb-like nets. Wong’s smaller related pieces of this period—often involving slivers and

other shapes cut from colorfully patterned watercolors and drawings that were reconfigured into tangled and layered compositions—bear titles such as Arachne (2020), Athena (2020), Bia (2020), Demeter (2019), and Persephone (2020), referring to the Greek goddesses. Though none of these works are representational, their titles invoke female figures who faced great challenges; their triumphs and defeats were woven into the cultural fabric. Wong channels their ideals of persistence and healing through her labor-intensive process and her fragile but interconnected materials. Though still complex, this set of works might look like an optimistic offshoot from Wong’s earlier works, or a turning away from the visual traces of violence or trauma—their palettes and compositions feel delicate, pretty. Yet Wong’s earlier experiences with trauma, grieving, and healing continue to surface and intermingle with a sense of levity and exuberance. Room-sized fiber installations such as Mind/Mountain (2018), Mind/Forest (2018), and Grandfather Dragon (2019) hang like a fog, their tulle netting resembling the hazy lace of neural networks. Grandfather Dragon , in particular, marks a shift in palette, employing more ochre and earth-toned hues, or the purples and yellows of a bruise. We also see this affective layering in a number of contemporaneous wall-hung works that set candle smoke against sewn transparencies. Wong began using smoke to lightly singe and darken her materials, referencing again the contrast of light and dark, absence and presence, while more specifically alluding to a sensory space of vigil or prayer. In pieces from 2020, segments of colored pencil and graphite on drafting film and gouache on paper are cut into shapes evoking flames ( Persephone 1 ) or swirls of dust and wind ( Persephone 2 and Persephone 3 ). Works from 2021 named after Icarus and the phoenix directly point to themes of escape and rebirth. Though these works, too, are largely abstract, the forms in these and many of Wong’s most recent pieces recall

Mira Dayal

Following the Lines

scientific diagrams and the patterns of cells, chains, ropes, feathers, or mesh. Wong derives these fragments from images of nature as well as crime scene photos, as a means of confronting, processing, and melding both pain and pleasure. Again, the process is important—these renderings are tedious, absorbing, meditative. At this juncture in Wong’s practice, the artist continues to explore psychological states and her process of healing, while her work keeps rising higher, like wisps of smoke. One of her most recent pieces, Spell Tapestry (2025), was suspended from a well of skylights in her solo exhibition Sacred Letters at ELLIO Fine Art in Houston. Made of dichroic film, drafting film, silk, cellophane, and thread, Spell Tapestry contains the variegated sections of color that one would expect to see in the stained glass of a church, but in the much lighter format of thin plastic films sewn together in multipart shapes. The overall piece, suspended with thin thread, is so light that it blows gently in the air, making its pastel and iridescent hues wink in the sunlight. For contrast, the work was shown alongside visually dense compositions worked out on paper or collaged on aluminum dibond, with names such as Elixir 5 (2025) and Internal Logic 1 (2025). The suspended piece feels all the more free by comparison, as if Wong had momentarily wriggled out of some of the tangled knots and nets and ropes and prisms that recur across those wall-hung pieces. But Wong has also kept turning to others’ stories, most recently through direct interpersonal connection and support. Motivated not only by her practice but also by her more than twenty- five-year career in health services at the University of California, San Francisco, Wong asked, How can an artist also be of service? Alongside her most recent exhibitions—including at Ogden Contemporary Arts in Utah and Maui Arts & Cultural Center in Hawaii—Wong organized programming for local communities to participate in safe space visualizations and workshops where they created their own artworks, which Wong framed as

“amulets” for protection. Having left her role at the university, Wong now has more time for both her practice and future programming, which she imagines will include both healing- focused art workshops and legal clinics where paid social workers (such as her former colleagues) and other collaborators can share information about local shelter systems and health programs. “I’m looking to be a conduit,” Wong shared in one of our conversations. It was a practical note, but also a fitting metaphor. A conduit can refer to a natural channel that carries water, perhaps the result of an overflow in one area that nevertheless sustains life or fosters growth elsewhere. Or it can refer to a flexible but durable metal tube fabricated to contain and protect electrical wires that convey power from one place to another. It is silent but not inert; it is fitted to its environment but contains something that was missing; you can imagine it crackling or churning as energy or fluid passes through. It is always on its way.

Mira Dayal

Following the Lines

Selected Works Fragments and Experiments

V. High school paintings (c. 1988)

pp. 36–38

Wong began her career as a painter. Her earliest works, which date to her final two years of high school, recall the paintings of Chaïm Soutine and other Expressionist artists associated with the School of Paris. Flitting between figuration and abstraction, these sepia-toned compositions explore themes that would endure through the next four decades of Wong’s practice. Domestic spaces are reconfigured into sites of instability, while female figures struggle to find their voice amid restraint.

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

Voice , 1988. Acrylic on canvas. 48 × 36 inches.

Opposite: Female Christ , 1988. Oil on burlap. 84 × 60 inches.

VII. Undergraduate work: Labor and Maintenance

pp. 40–41

As an undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute, Wong turned her attention from painting to performance. How female bodies navigate space was still a concern for her, though here, she moved from domestic spaces into spaces of labor to investigate how bodies might leave visual or sonic traces. Maintenance closet and Trace documented the residues— handprints, suds—left by Wong in her work as a janitor at SFAI. In Crevice (1992), she inspected the crevices between the slats of wood in a paneled wall at the school with a magnifying glass in an attempt to apprehend the invisible.

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

House painting on canvas , 1989. Oil on canvas. 60 × 48 inches.

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

Maintenance closet , 1991. Performance with water, tower janitorial closet with dirt. Duration variable.

Opposite: Trace , 1991. Installation with film projection of washing dishes in industrial kitchen of San Francisco Art Institute. Duration variable.

Crevice , 1992. Performance with magnifying glass, wood panel wall. Duration variable.

VII. Undergraduate work: Sex, Surveillance, and Subjugation

pp. 43–44

Other undergraduate performances sought to make visible the violence—literal and symbolic—that pornography inflicts upon women. In Guerrero St. , Wong played the movie Deep Throat on a television set placed in the window of her apartment. The explicit scenes were redacted; to come in and see the full film, viewers had to call Wong on a telephone placed outside. Excision was also the central technique in Cut and Strip . For Cut , Wong glued strips of flesh from pornography magazines to her own body. In Strip , she lined the cracks of the sidewalk in San Francisco’s Union Square with small strips of text and images culled from pornography magazines, echoing her performance Crevice .

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

Opposite: Guerrero St , 1992. Redacted video of Deep Throat film, telephone, video installation in artist’s apartment. Duration variable.

Cut , 1992. Performance with pornography magazines, artist’s body. 8 × 10 inches (photograph documentation).

VI. Undergraduate work: Defiled Childhood

pp. 46–48

Three undergraduate installations evince Wong’s earliest engagement with textile—and with how the medium might be used to evoke, memorialize, and repair violence against girls. In Cherry cloth , Wong defaced children’s nightgowns with cherry pie filling as if it were blood. She smeared frosting on doll parts and then assembled them in stacked cake boxes outfitted with a tablecloth in Baked goods . Lo_ita , meanwhile, continued the artist’s exploration of silence. Wong embroidered children’s names on thirty found coats and then ripped one letter out. The coats were installed on hooks at a height of forty-eight inches, the typical height at which children would hang their coats. On the opposing wall, a single pair of man’s pants hung with loose threads zipped into the fly.

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

Strip , 1992. Performance with pornography magazines, sidewalk. 0.5 × 84 inches (magazine strip).

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

Cherry cloth , 1992. Children’s nightgowns, cherry pie filling. Dimensions variable.

Opposite: Baked goods , 1993. Cake frosting, bakery boxes, doll parts, tablecloth. 60 × 48 × 48 inches.

VII. Undergraduate into graduate work: Deflowered

pp. 50–51

In two large-scale installations from the final year of her studies at SFAI, Wong expanded her use of language and textile. RA–E drew on and revised the method of Lo_ita . Here, girls’ socks were embroidered with individual letters and then hung on a clothesline at the height of a typical adult. The message communicated here was more explicit: the socks were mismatched so that the letters R, A, P, and E came together, over and over again. In Deflowered , Wong returned to the technique of excision. Children’s nightgowns were embroidered with floral trim and then torn. The embroidered flowers were installed on the floor as the nightgowns’ only remaining trace.

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

Lo_ita , 1993. Children’s coats, a pair of men’s pants, coat hooks, embroidery thread. 48 × 456 × 6 inches

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

RA-E , 1993. 24-foot clothesline, children’s socks, embroidery thread, clothespins. 6 × 288 inches.

Opposite: Deflowered , 1994. Installation with girl’s nightgowns, embroidery thread. 180 × 180 inches.

VIII. Early Experiments with Light (c. 1997–98)

pp. 53–54

Wong turned her attention to a new medium, photography, in the years following her graduate studies. The resulting works are abstract meditations on the relationship between lightness and darkness, between presence and absence. But the themes that predominated her earlier work quietly persist. Embed ’s hidden ropey infrastructure recalls the wall cracks in Crevice , while the hazy red center in Creation evokes the smears in Cherry cloth . The delicate, dangling glass beads in Reverie , meanwhile, foreshadow Wong’s later textile installations.

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

Opposite: Embed , 1998. Photograph. 17 × 21 inches. Creation , 1998. Color photograph mounted on black gatorboard. 17 × 21 inches.

IX. Language Lost and Recovered

pp. 56–58

A series of works that build upon Wong’s graduate work at SFAI center her desire to use textile to recover buried memories and lost language. In Read Between the Lines , her MFA thesis, Wong embroidered garbled language on cotton strips sewn together with thread dipped in cow’s blood. Over two decades later, Wong restaged the work. This time, the textile was hung not as a wall-mounted scroll, but as a gentle loop suspended from the ceiling. Begun in 1998 and finished in 2024, Lost Language brings together scraps of embroidered linen, tulle, and other fabrics with painted paper and magazine clippings. While the text in Read Between the Lines was English, the text in this piece is primarily Hebrew—the language of Wong’s Jewish ancestors.

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

Reverie , 1998. Color photograph mounted on black gatorboard. 17 × 21 inches.

Selected Works: Fragments and Experiments

Read Between the Lines , 1995. Cow’s blood, thread, and cotton with clamp lights. 14 × 180 inches.

Opposite: Read Between the Lines , 2018. Cow’s blood, thread, cotton.

Selected Works To Connect and Repair

Lost Language , 1998/2024. Embroidered linen, fabric, tulle, painted paper, magazine clippings, thread. 72 × 36 × 24 inches. Photograph by John Janca.

X. Gatherings

pp. 62–64

In the early 2010s, Wong began weaving together the disparate themes and strategies of her earlier practice. While her prior works sought ways to document trauma experienced by women and girls, here, she moves toward healing and repair. In Float , Recollection , and Biology of Thought , found materials are sewn together by hand to create diaphanous abstract sculptures. The resulting works are sometimes mounted to the wall and sometimes suspended from the ceiling. They have the look and feel of netting or cobwebs—delicate structures that connect, contain, and support. Though Wong’s materials are all inorganic, many are used to sustain life (such as oxygen tubing), or to hold the food that nourishes us (such as produce netting).

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Float , 2014. Wire, rope, string, oxygen tubing, tulle. 84 × 96 × 60 inches.

Opposite: Recollection , 2017. Thread, plastic bags. 48 × 36 inches.

XI. From the Ashes

pp. 66–68

Wong has always maintained a drawing practice alongside her textile practice. A series of drawings created circa 2019 and 2020 borrow their titles from Greek goddesses such as Athena and Persephone: both women who triumphed over great challenges. Some of the drawings are rendered in watercolor or gouache, while others nod to Wong’s fiber practice through the use of sewn drafting film. Many also use candle smoke as a material—the physical residue of a prayer or meditation. A related installation, Phoenix , transforms Wong’s two-dimensional drawing practice into a three-dimensional one. Graphite on drafting film is sewn and then suspended overhead. It floats toward the ceiling, as if literally rising from ashes.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Biology of Thought , 2017. Produce netting, tulle, thread. 144 × 192 × 72 inches.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Athena 2 , 2020. Colored pencil and netting on drafting film with sewing. 14 × 11 inches.

Opposite: Persephone 1 , 2020. Gouache and candle smoke on paper, with colored pencil and graphite on woven drafting film. 24 × 19 inches.

XII. Making Room

pp. 70–77

Room-sized installations such as Silent Music and Guardian of the Spirits draw on the techniques and materials of Wong’s sewn sculptures from the early 2010s, while also extending her exploration of color and transparency. Plastic bags and panels of dichroic film and cellophane, all of different hues, reflect and offer glimpses of the world around them. They represent, Wong says, “the growth and flowering of the feminist body, reborn and reclaimed by the constant repair of the spirit.” As their reflective materials interact with the light in the surrounding room, the installations appear to reanimate— to pulse with life.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Phoenix , 2021. Graphite on drafting film with sewing, suspended with monofilament. 132 × 132 inches. Photograph by John Janca.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Silent Music , 2019. Dichroic film, vinyl table cloth, plastic bags, gold foil, hand-painted vellum, thread. 96 × 216 × 24 inches.

Opposite: Detail of Silent Music , 2019.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Guardian of the Spirits , 2022. Sewn materials such as silk and polyester organza, cellophane, dichroic film, vinyl table cloth and scanned images of artist’s paintings and drawings, suspended from monofilament wire. 180 × 204 × 48 inches. Photograph by Cam McLeod.

Opposite: Detail of Guardian of the Spirits , 2022.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Hydra , 2024. Colored pencil and graphite on laser-cut and heat-molded acrylic. 96 × 60 × 252 inches. Photograph by Christian Gianelli.

Opposite: Detail of Hydra , 2024. Photograph by Holly Wong.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Spell Tapestry , 2025. Dichroic film, drafting film, silk, cellophane, thread. 108 × 168 × 48 inches. Photograph by Light42 Studio.

XIII. Bodies of Light and Shadow

pp. 79–82

In works such as Deconstructed Quilt 1 and Shadow Body 5 , Wong explores how the interplay of light, shadow, and color might give physical form to a particular spirit: her deceased mother. The LED light in Deconstructed Quilt 1 illuminates the precipice between the physical and spirit worlds, communicating a signal from beyond. In Shadow Body 5 , overlapping layers of tulle suggest the fragile boundary between life and death, while map pins potentially chart the spirit’s course in the afterlife. Like Deconstructed Quilt 1 , the room-sized installation Body of Light draws on the Korean Bojagi patchwork technique and Chinese funeral customs. Quilted textiles recall the burial blankets that the children of the deceased place upon their loved ones, while the LED light suggests the persistence of the deceased’s spirit.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Opposite: Deconstructed Quilt 1 , 2022. Silk, cotton, and organza with LED lighting. 60 × 60 × 24 inches. Photograph by Wes Magyar.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Body of Light , 2023. Flat felled seam technique with silk, cotton, netting, LED lighting. 96 × 180 × 60 inches. Photograph by John Janca.

XIV. Elixirs of Aluminum

pp. 84–89

Several of Wong’s most recent drawings employ a new substrate: aluminum dibond. Collages made with alcohol ink, graphite, oil paint, charcoal, archival printing, and candle smoke are mounted to shaped panels. As with the artist’s wall-hung textile sculptures, these works straddle the boundary between two and three dimensions. The imagery is biomorphic: knots recall the body’s interior intestines, while bold reds evoke smears of blood. A ghostly face seems to haunt the background of Elixir 2 . These images come together to create abstract ecosystems where nature might grow over a wound, producing what Wong describes as a “beautiful scar.” Each element relies on another for support. The looping forms in Internal Logic 1 evince this interdependence at a smaller scale.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Shadow Body 5 , 2023. Polyester tulle, thread, map pins. 68 × 48 × 4 inches. Photograph by Light42 Studio.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Elixir 2 , 2025. Collaged paintings and drawings on shaped aluminum dibond, with alcohol ink, acrylic ink and paint, charcoal, and archival printing. 48 × 60 inches. Photograph by John Janca.

Opposite: Internal Logic 1 , 2025. Gouache, graphite, candle smoke, and cut drafting film on paper. 19 × 24 inches. Photograph by John Janca.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Elixir 5 , 2025. Collaged paintings and drawings on shaped aluminum dibond, with alcohol ink, acrylic ink and paint, charcoal, and archival printing. 48 × 80 inches. Photograph by John Janca.

Selected Works: To Connect and Repair

Talisman 3 , 2024. Alcohol ink, graphite, oil paint, archival printing, charcoal, and candle smoke, mounted on shaped aluminum dibond. 48 × 80 inches. Photograph by John Janca.

HOLLY WONG

Material Instinct , 120710 Gallery, Berkeley, CA Passion for Paper , Strohl Art Center, Chautauqua, NY “Write me letters” you write to me , A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Frayed Stories of Life , Arc Gallery, San Francisco, CA Meeting of Makers, Merging of Space , Murray State University, Clara Eagle Gallery, Murray, KY Monumentally Fragile (three-person show), College of the Desert, Palm Desert, CA San Francisco Art Market, public project presented by SLATE Contemporary Hang Time , Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Magic Hour: Fiber and Film , St. Kate – The Arts Hotel, Milwaukee, WI Sunshowers , A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY California Abstraction , ELLIO Fine Art, Houston, NY Out of Line , Court Tree Collective Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Serenity: One with Nature , UCSF National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health, San Francisco, CA Structures of Feeling , A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY THEORY FORWARD: Shape, Line, Color, Surface / Texture , O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, Mill Valley, CA Meeting of Makers , Merging of Space, Jack Olson Gallery, Northern Illinois University, IL 1st Anniversary Exhibition , ELLIO Fine Art, Houston, TX 12th Annual Drawing Discourse , University of North Carolina, Asheville, NC Remnants , Wisconsin Museum of Quilts & Fiber Arts, Cedarburg, WI Fractal Nature , A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Weave, Bundle, Cut and Layer , Root Division, San Francisco, CA The de Young Open , de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA Scythia, 13th International Textile Art Biennial , Ivano-Frankivs’k, Ukraine USPS Mail Project , Pelham Art Center, Pelham, NY and Sunset Art Studios, Dallas, TX Forever is Composed of Nows , A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY ECHOES: From Here to There , Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, CA Winter Solstice , Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA RE:RE:RE: patterns , La Bodega Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Active Directions of the Mind , A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Born in 1971, North Miami Beach, FL Lives and works in San Francisco, CA

2023

EDUCATION

1995

Master of Fine Arts, San Francisco Art Institute (Concentration: New Genres)

1993

Bachelor of Fine Arts, San Francisco Art Institute (Concentration: New Genres)

GALLERY AFFILIATIONS

2022

A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (National Member) Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia, PA ELLIO Fine Art, Houston, TX SLATE Contemporary Gallery, Oakland, CA Walker Fine Art, Denver, CO

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2025

Full Circle , SLATE Contemporary Gallery, Oakland, CA Sacred Letters , ELLIO Fine Art, Houston, TX

2021

2024

Incantations , Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Mending Body/Mending Mind , A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Holly Wong: Manifold , OXH Gallery/Tempus Projects, Tampa, FL Guardian of the Spirits , Curfman Gallery, Colorado State University at Fort Collins, CO Holly Wong: Emergence , Ogden Contemporary Arts, Ogden, UT Holly Wong: Mending Body/Mending Mind , Schaefer Inter- national Gallery, Maui Arts & Cultural Center, Maui, HI

2020

2023

2021

Phoenix , SLATE Contemporary Gallery, Oakland, CA

2019

Silent Music , Evanston Art Center, Evanston, IL

2018

Holly Wong – Mind/Forest , Visual Art Exchange (VAE) CUBE space, Raleigh, NC

2017

Biology of thought , The Carving Studio & Sculpture Center, West Rutland, VT

AWARDS & HONORS

2024

Current Statement Award Winner, Ninth Annual Exhibition in Print, Surface Design Association, Fall 2024 (In Press)

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2025

White Linen Night , ELLIO Fine Art, Houston, TX phantom charges , A.I.R Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Perfectly Lost , Walker Fine Art Gallery, Denver, CO Paper Planes , SLATE Contemporary Gallery, Oakland, CA Heat Wave , SLATE Contemporary Gallery, Oakland, CA California Jewish Open , The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA In Flux: Recalibrating the Unknown , Museum of Northern California Art (MONCA), Chico, CA

2023

California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, Established Artist category

2019

Integrity: Arts & Culture Association, Grant Recipient

2024

2007

George Sugarman Foundation, Grant Recipient Puffin Foundation Ltd., Visual Art Grant Recipient

2006

Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Grant Recipient

2005

George Sugarman Foundation, Grant Recipient

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

2004

Puffin Foundation Ltd., Visual Art Grant Recipient

George Family Center for Healing Arts, Rowan University, NJ Metro National, Houston, TX Texas Medical Center, Houston, TX Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company, Milwaukee, WI Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA

1998

Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award

1996

Western Arts Federation (WESTAF) Honorable Mention in New Genres

1989

Presidential Scholar in the Arts

Private Collections across the U.S.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

2025

Alison Medley, “Turning Chaotic Memories Into Art – Holly Wong’s Suspended Environments Draw Viewers Into Radical Repair in Houston,” PaperCity Magazine , June 18, 2025 (online) “The Beauty of Scars: Holly Wong, A Quiet Celebration,” The Art Bridge / Artiste Culture , Edition VII, June 2025 (print) Lakshmi Rivera, “A View from the Easel,” Hyperallergic , May 22, 2025 (online) “Patterns of Resilience: Holly Wong,” The Art Bridge / Artiste Culture , Edition VI, February 2025 (print) Holly Wong: Incantations , Introduction by John Yau, Exhibition Catalog, Fall 2024 (print) “Embrace: Expect the Unexpected: The Ninth Annual Exhibition in Print,” Surface Design Association , Fall 2024 (print) Julia Weber, “In Chautauqua Visual Art’s ‘Passion for Paper,’

2024

artists innovate, explore with everyday material,” The Chautauquan Daily , July 11, 2024 (online)

2023

“MACC presents Chenta Laury’s Adaptive Frameworks and Holly Wong’s Mending Body/Mind, Sept. 12 to Oct. 28, 2023,” Maui Now , September 13, 2023 (online) Heather Hopkins, “Installations by Holly Wong and Stephanie Leitch Create Liminal Experiences at OCA,” Artists of Utah , August 19, 2023 (online) Etty Yaniv, “Holly Wong Guardian of the Spirits,” Art Spiel , May 3, 2023 (online) Leslie Katz, “Bay Area’s Big Contemporary Art Fair at Fort Mason This Weekend,” SFGATE , April 22, 2023 Christian Arndt, “Guardian of the Spirits Gallery Embraces Femininity,” The Rocky Mountain Collegian , April 12, 2023 (online) Mary Corbin, “Weaving Fabric, Film, and Light, Holly Wong Celebrates Women’s Energy,” 48 Hills , February 20, 2023 (online) Jane Vick, “Holly Wong’s Alchemical Art Process,” Pacific Sun Weekly , August 17, 2022 (online) Jane Vick, “Exhibition Exploring Shape and Color Opens at O’Hanlon,” Pacific Sun Weekly , July 27, 2022 (online) D. Dominick Lombardi, “A Virtual Exhibition at Rhombus Space,” DART International Magazine , October 8, 2021 (online) DeWitt Cheng, “Holly Wong; Phoenix,” Visual Art Source Weekly (May 15, 2021) Etty Yaniv, “Holly Wong: Phoenix at SLATE Contemporary,” Art Spiel , March 29, 2021 (online) “Phoenix: Holly Wong’s Elaborate Drawing Installations and Sculptures @ SLATE Contemporary, Oakland,” Juxtapoz Magazine , March 17, 2021 (online)

2022

2021

SPECIAL THANKS

Al Wong, husband and fellow artist, who provided the cinematography in Mending Body/Mending Mind

Edited by Elizabeth Wiet Designed by Bryce Wilner Typeset in Grotesque No. 3

Aya Karpin´ska, friend and fellow artist, who wrote the poem and created the sound composition for Mending Body/Mending Mind

Printed and bound by Graphic Arts Studio, Barrington, IL

Soad Kader, friend and fellow artist, who assisted with the combing and braiding segments in Mending Body/Mending Mind

All images © Holly Wong, 2025 transform/death © Aya Karpin´ska, 2025 “Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology” © Elizabeth Wiet, 2025 “Following the Lines” © Mira Dayal, 2025

Gallery Partners: A.I.R. Gallery, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, ELLIO Fine Art, SLATE Contemporary, Walker Fine Art

Non-Profit Partners: Carving Studio & Sculpture Center, Curfman Gallery at Colorado State University, Evanston Art Center, Maui Arts & Cultural Center, Ogden Contemporary Arts, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, Visual Art Exchange (VAE)

CONTRIBUTORS

Elizabeth Wiet is a writer, editor, and curator based in New York. She is currently Deputy Editor at Topical Cream and Contributing Editor at Bidoun , and served as Director of Exhibitions & Fellowship at A.I.R. Gallery from 2022–2025. Her writing has appeared in frieze , The Brooklyn Rail , Elephant , Momus , The Quietus , IMPULSE , and other publications. She holds a Ph.D in English from Yale University and is in the process of completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Maximalism: An Art of the Minor , and with Bidoun, is editing the first monograph on Lebanese-Egyptian artist Nicolas Moufarrege. Aya Karpin´ska expresses poetry through a variety of forms—video, sound, and print—that consciously engage with the affordances of each medium. Central to her work is the role that interfaces play in shaping our relationship with technology. She received a Fellowship for Electronic Writing from Brown University and a Master of Professional Studies, Interactive Telecommunications Program from New York University. Mira Dayal is an artist, writer, and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. She co-edited Track changes: a handbook for art criticism (Paper Monument, 2023) and co-publishes the collaborative artist book series prompt: . Dayal has held solo exhibitions at venues including Fuller Rosen Gallery, Philadelphia; Princeton University, NJ; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; Gymnasium, Brooklyn; Lubov, New York; and NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; as well as two-person exhibitions at Kunstverein Dresden, Germany, and Abrons Art Center, New York. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Feral File; Barnard College, New York; Miriam, Brooklyn; lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA; Parent Company, Brooklyn; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Artspace New Haven, CT; OCHI, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; NURTUREart, Brooklyn; and other spaces. She teaches at Barnard College and the School of Visual Arts in New York.

My alma mater, San Francisco Art Institute, which was a fertile ground for early exploration and experimentation

Ed Love, my teacher and mentor at the New World School for the Arts, who started me on my journey

The California Arts Council, for their generous fellowship support

Listen to Aya Karpin´ska’s transform/death as a sound composition, created for Mending Body/Mending Mind

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