Ran Hwang — De fil en aiguille — Inception Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 19, 2014 → January 31, 2015

«I create large icons such as a Buddha or a traditional vase, using materials from the fashion industry".

Born in Pusan and trained as a realist painter at Chung Ang University in Seoul, Ran Hwang moved to New York in 1997 to attend the School of Visual Arts. After studying, she worked in an embroidery design studio in the garment district where her drawings were scanned into a computer, generating gorgeous machine-made patterns. While working there she noticed boxes and boxes of unused buttons, stacked in a corner. She asked if she could use them and was told, “Take as much as you like."Hwang soon began incorporating buttons, first into small scale collages and later in room-sized installations.

Ran Hwang, Whimsical Dream, 2013 Buttons and pins on wood panel — 120 × 200 cm Courtesy of Ran Hwang & Inception Gallery

Ran Hwang uses fashion materials to dress her wooden or plexiglass panels. Threads, pins, beads, needles or cristal buttons, the Korean artist uses these tiny elements to create impressive pieces, full of poetry and dramatic spirituality. Both artist and craftsman, Ran Hwang imagines her works, often monochromatic, with infinite attention to detail and unique dexterity. Taking shape with distance, these dreamlike reliefs break down and reveal their composition while one approaches it. This accurate work requires both physical rigor and mental strength. Being buddhist, Ran Hwang built her work as a session of meditation with devotion and spiritualism.

Ran Hwang, Contemplation Time, 0 Buttons and Pins on wood panel — 120 × 200 cm Courtesy of Ran Hwang & Inception Gallery

“The process of building large installations are time consuming and repetitive and it requires manual ef- fort which provides a form of self-meditation. I hammer thousands of pins into a wall like a monk who, facing the wall, practices Zen. My works are divided into two groups. In the first, pins are used to hold buttons remain free to move and suggest the genetic human tendency to be irresolute. I choose buttons, which are as common and ordinary as human beings. In the second group of works, a massive number of pins connect yards of thread creating a negative space of the presented images, threads suggesting connections between human beings and a communication network between seemingly unlinked human experiences. The filled negative space in the absence of the positive space suggests mortality at the heart of self-recognition.»

Ran Hwang, Buddha Falling in Love, 2013 Buttons and pins on Plexiglas — 150 × 119 cm Courtesy of Ran Hwang & Inception Gallery

Ran Hwang is present in many collections such as the Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Contemporary Art Center of Des Moines as well as the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong and Paris.