Step 1: rid the pomelo skin of bitterness
THE CHINESE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF CHICAGO
March 3 - April 14, 2024
Step 1: rid the pomelo skin of bitterness presents an intimate collection of Hope Wang’s creative writing, reference photos, and object arrangements as contextual frameworks for the “resolved” pieces that more often represent her visual art practice.
Leaning into the repetitive nature of printmaking, the slippage of meaning when reading poetry, and the slow craft of weaving, Wang shares the resulting emotional capital conveyed through various mediums. Alongside pensive observations of her architectural surroundings, Wang also incorporates the creative process within the work itself.
Creating is a miracle, an accumulation of chance gestures and small decisions. This exhibition poses that between the studio ephemera and the capital-A Art, nothing in the show is more important than the other, as they all inform each other in the broader trajectory of an artist's practice.
Read full exhibition text here.
birdsong lanced by the power washer roar
Hand-painted cotton and wool
85 x 63 inches
2023
Selected poem from YELLOW KNEES, by Hope Wang. Utilizing the repetitive nature of printmaking and the variable ways poetry can be read and understood, Wang employs the letterpress as an elegiac tool. Manufacturing spontaneity and imperfection on a machine often used to mass-produce printed texts, the type was meticulously set, printed, re-set, and then “mis-printed” to appear as if letters were shaken and lost over countless runs through the press. These prints represent the tensions of translation: the materialization of language into text, as well as its “debris,” provokes a new reading. Much like memory, repeated use simultaneously degrades the original, but also takes on its own meaning.
The text is set with Bulmer Roman. Printed by Ruby Figueroa at Fata Morgana Press.
Paliimsests
Letterpress print
12 x 19 x 2 inches
Edition of 10
2021
electric lines humming like mayflies above Lake Erie
Hand-painted cotton, tencel, bamboo yarn
42 x 70 inches
2023
Palimmpst
Letterpress print
12 x 19 x 2 inches
Edition of 10
2021
Palimpssts
Letterpress print
12 x 19 x 2 inches
Edition of 10
2021
Manuscript draft of Yellow Knees
YELLOW KNEES is an unfinished poetry anthology that frames frustrated love and its collateral melancholy as an inheritance passed through various kinds of relationships. Wang worked on this during the first year of the pandemic lockdown and then shelved it in lieu of other projects.
Paper from somebody’s office, thread, years of crying in the car
2020
buttered tongue chokes the sky
Cotton, wool, polyester, linen
49 x 56 inches
2021
Plimpsests
Letterpress print
12 x 19 x 2 inches
Edition of 10
2021
Humpty Dumpty
Screenprint on fiberglass mesh, embossed paper collage
53 x 32 inches
2022
Brick Arrangements
Found bricks from along the Lake Erie shoreline, bungee cord, petrified guavas
Varying sizes
2024
Artist reference sketchbook
Archive dump of phone photographs, screenshots of color inspiration from Chinese dramas, literary quotes, artwork title lists that resemble a compost bucket inventory
2024
