Wang’s work treats the architectural landscape as a living document of visual language where building facades become eroded, redacted, and defaced. She translates images of architectural “scars” in factory lots, construction sites, and city commutes through handweaving and printmaking.
“soft craters in the yard” features a series of textiles that draw on empty parking lots and facades of industrial buildings. The American Midwest is populated with large expanses of warehouses and manufacturing facilities, some abandoned and some still home to low-wage, grueling operations. These works reference the expanse of corrugated metal that becomes the horizon sky, and the golden-hour light casting shadows against buildings when shifts end and labourers have gone home.
Wang captures the weightlessness of one’s own experience between the bustling energy of city-life and industrial work, as well as the melancholy and uncanny brilliance of an empty lot where one’s existence might register again. Employing the repetitive and tedious processes of handweaving and printmaking, her work reflects the delirious, dissociative nature of mundane manual labour. Paired with dream-like weavings of elusive shadows fluttering against industrial buildings, vivid depictions of asphalt give the works gravity as Wang draws viewers literally to the ground. For her, parking lots, roads, and sidewalks have become sites of loss and longing. With the posture of a neck craned downward, she refers to the scars of recurring traffic left in the asphalt as wounds, treating the structural environment as something flesh-like: of body, of ghosts.
buttered tongue chokes the sky
Handwoven textile with cotton and wool and polyester and linen, velcro, wood mount
49 x 56 x 1 inches
2021
as the steam rises from the asphalt, 1
7 layer screenprint on Rives BFK paper, screen-printed matboard embossed with asphalt texture
14 x 16”
2020
red dust sun a thrashing fish, 2021
Cotton and wool
34 x 28”
face prostrate, temples kissing the baked facade
2017
Handwoven on the TC2 jacquard loom with cotton and wool
48 x 44”
soft dawn marred with birdsong
2017
Handwoven on the TC2 jacquard loom with cotton and wool
66 x 44”
nodding and smiling
nodding and smiling at everything
until my head falls off
until everything falls off
nodding and laughing at
how nice the sun feels
2017, handwoven with cotton and wool
30" x 61"
waiting for the echo in my clenched jaw to deaden whilst the rustling outside grows warmer and warmer
Handwoven with cotton and linen, velcro
101 x 53 inches
2017
Compelled by the same metaphor, Wang employs the process of letterpress-printing to translate her poetry into visual objects. Manufacturing spontaneity and imperfection on a machine often used to mass-produce printed texts, the metal type was meticulously set and printed and then “misprinted” as if letters were shaken and lost over multiple runs through the press. Wang explores palimpsests through the materialisation of language, ghosting of tire marks, and ever-changing industrial landscapes of labour.
Paliimsests
Letterpress print
12 x 19”
2021
This is a selected poem from YELLOW KNEES by Hope Wang. YELLOW KNEES is a poetry anthology that frames frustrated love and its collateral melancholy as an inheritance passed through various kinds of internal, familial, romantic, and platonic relationships. The writing cites walking and repetitive manual labour as rituals to process selfhood. Using the printing press as an elegiac material, the type was meticulously set and printed and then “misprinted” as if letters were shaken and lost over multiple runs through the press.
The text is set with Bulmer Roman. Deep gratitude to Ruby Figueroa who letterpress printed the work at Fata Morgana Press in Chicago, IL. March 2021.