Holly Wong

Lives and works in San Francisco, CA, USA

Artist statement

My work begins with damage, and the repair has to be made of something physical. I cut apart my own drawings and paintings. Then I stitch, collage, and suspend the fragments into forms more complex than the originals. I call this radical repair. Restoration returns a thing to what it was. This kind of mending makes something new at the site of the tear and leaves the seam visible. Vanishing Act is a three-channel video installation projected onto quilted panels of projection fabric, hospital gauze, and cotton. The footage moves between a body in water and images drawn from ICE enforcement raids. The soundtrack is a poem I made by erasure from two federal immigration forms, the Warrant of Removal and the Notice to Appear. I set that poem against classical passages on Lethe, the river of forgetting, and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Figures surface on the cloth and go out again. No single image can be held still. Vanishing Act looks at violence carried out by the state. Mending Body/Mending Mind turns to violence inside a family. Silk, cotton, and antique lace are sewn together, cut apart, and reassembled as patchwork suspended across the room. Two-channel video and sound move through the panels. Images of sewing and grooming stand in for violence that was never spoken. A poem by Aya Karpińska carries my late mother's story of sexual violence. The work proposes mending as an act of love between mother and daughter. The Deconstructed Quilts memorialize my mother. They...

Artwork