Recipient Information
Location
Starkville, Mississippi
Medium
Drawing
Year of Award
2021
Grant or Fellowship
Southern Prize and State Fellowships
Grant Amount
$5,000
Artist Biography
Ming Ying Hong is an interdisciplinary artist based in Starkville, Mississippi. She received her BFA from the University of Kentucky and was a Danforth Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis, where she received her MFA in visual art. Currently, she teaches at Mississippi State University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art. Ming has exhibited throughout the United States in venues such as the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, and Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Artist Statement
My work explores bodies at the margins, questioning the way we define, categorize, and assign power to them. Recognizable forms are fragmented, defamiliarized, and remixed to conflate the masculine with the feminine, the dead with the alive, the ideal and the grotesque. 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.
Amalgamation #1
Year: 2018
Medium: Graphite on mylar
Size (h x w x d): 50 x 30 inches
In the Amalgamation series, images found on the internet, magazines, and books are used to create drawings that bring seemingly contradictory elements together to question the way we define and value constructed identities. Here, this mass of curls, skin, airy forms, create the semblance of a head that is both monstrous and angelic.
Amalgamation #2
Year: 2018
Medium: Graphite on mylar
Size (h x w x d): 50 x 39 inches
Sandwiching luscious locks of hair typically found in women’s beauty magazines are a pair of cracked, androgynous lips that have been pulled apart and reoriented to resemble female genitalia. By combining these masculine and feminine elements together, the image is purposefully unsexed, ushering the possibility of a world without a need for such binary classifications.
Amalgamation #3
Year: 2018
Medium: Graphite on mylar
Size (h x w x d): 50 x 39 inches
This drawing borrows imagery from fitness magazines, nature magazines, and images of a phone app called “Figure 1,” which is used by medical professionals as a diagnostic tool. The work challenges ideas pertaining to taxonomy and the body by combining animal, male, and female forms into a single, intertwining mass.
Amalgamation #3 (Detail)
Year: 2018
Medium: Graphite on mylar
Size (h x w x d): 50 x 39 inches
To the left of the parted mouth and extended tongue is what appears to be a playful, translucent bubble. The original image stems from a medical textbook featuring a ruptured scrotum.
Amalgamation #4
Year: 2019
Medium: Graphite on mylar
Size (h x w x d): 50 x 39 inches
This drawing peels back the surface layers of skin, removing the superficial layers used to categorize individuals, to reveal the inner workings of the body, which is simply fleshy tissue in various states of health.
Amalgamation #4 (Detail)
Year: 2019
Medium: Graphite on mylar
Size (h x w x d): 50 x 39 inches
Amalgamation #5
Year: 2019
Medium: Graphite on mylar
Size (h x w x d): 50 x 39 inches
Amalgamation #6
Year: 2019
Medium: Graphite on mylar
Size (h x w x d): 50 x 39 inches
Amalgamations #.1
Year: 2019
Medium: Graphite on mylar
Size (h x w x d): 7 x 5 inches
Amalgamations #.2
Year: 2019
Medium: Graphite on mylar
Size (h x w x d): 7” x 9”