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
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Following the Lines
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