James T. Hong

1/1

Installation view, *Apologies* (2012 – ongoing), *Apologies and Other Regrets*, Empty Gallery, June 8 – August 17, 2024.

Installation view, *Stabbed in the Back* (2023 – ongoing), *Apologies and Other Regrets*, Empty Gallery, June 8 – August 17, 2024.

Installation view of *De Anima* in the 14th Gwangju Biennale, April 7 – July 9, 2023.

James T. Hong, *Apologies v.2016.2* at Jewish Museum of Vienna, 2022

*Three Arguments About the Opium* War (2015), Art Basel Hong Kong, 2022

*De Anima*, 2021, two-channel video installation

Image courtesy of the artist.

*EMP*, 2020, watercolor on paper

Image courtesy of the artist.

*Opening Closing Forgetting* (still), 2018

Image courtesy of the artist.

*Terra Nullius or: How to be a Nationalist* (still), 2015

Image courtesy of the artist.

James T. Hong is a Taiwanese-American artist and filmmaker whose research-based practice interrogates the metaphysics of truth, navigating the intersection of epistemological, ethical, and socio-political questions. While best known for his experimental and essayistic films, his practice has recently expanded into sculpture. Hong critically traces the racialized power mechanisms that underpin processes of knowledge production and dissemination, and how they perpetuate historical trauma and contemporary injustice in America and East Asia.

Hong was awarded the Grand Prize (Taiwan Competition) at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (2021); Art Matters Foundation Grant, NYC (2018), Best Documentary – Mecenat Award from the Busan International Film Festival (2018) and Best World Documentary Award at the Jihlava International Festival (2007). His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Empty Gallery (2024, 2019), the Jewish Museum of Vienna (2022); and Ikon Gallery (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Bonner Kunstverein (2024); the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2022, 2017); Center Pompidou Metz (2021); 12th Taipei Biennial (2020); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia (2018).

PRESS:

H.G. Masters, ‘Apologies, James T. Hong at Empty Gallery‘, ArtAsiaPacific
Chris Wan Feng, ‘Apologies and Other Regrets‘, Ocula
Shuman Wang, ‘Interview with James T. Hong‘, Artforum China
Mabel Lui, ‘From the Pope to Macron, world leaders’ apologies compiled for artist’s Hong Kong show‘, South China Morning Post

James T Hong_Bio CV
DOWNLOAD pdf (227 KB)

James T Hong press archive
DOWNLOAD pdf (9.5 MB)


2024-11-14	Para Site 2024 Benefit Auction
	Empty Gallery is pleased to support Para Site’s 2024 Benefit Auction. The works by Doris Guo & Weili Wang and James T. Hong are available to view on 9/F of H Queen’s in Hong Kong through 17 November, the silent auction will continue through November 20, 10.30pm HKT. Read more …
2024-11-06	H.G. Masters on James T. Hong at Empty Gallery
	In issue 141 of ArtAsiaPacific, deputy editor H.G. Masters covered James T. Hong’s Apologies, which was on view at Empty Gallery from June through August 2024. Read more …
2024-11-05	Intermissions: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork & Laetitia Sonami at Renaissance Society, Chicago
	At the Renaissance Society, Gork develops a new project for the Intermissions series in collaboration with performer, sound artist, and electronic musician Laetitia Sonami. Directly engaging with this unique setting, Gork introduces new physical elements into the empty gallery space, positions multiple sound sources, and experiments with the room’s unusual acoustics. For two days, Sonami and Gork mobilize and shape the sound within this environment across various listening zones. Visitors are free to come and go during the durational performance. Curated by Karsten Lund with Michael Harrison Special thanks to Meyer Sound, Berkeley, CA. Read more …
2024-11-05	Vunkwan Tam collaborating with Winsome Wong and Annisa Cheung, HICCUP, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong
	On the weekend of November 8-9, Winsome Wong will present ‘Love Song: the bittersweet crumbs of having them at home’ in collaboration with Vunkwan Tam and Annisa Cheung, at Tai Kwun’s HICCUP, a festival of body and sound co-presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary, Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong (Sound Forms), and Per.Platform. For the full schedule, see the link below. Read more …
2024-11-01	Doris Guo, The Jar at K4, Oslo
	Doris Guo’s solo presentation, The Jar, is on view November 1st through 24th at K4 in Oslo, a non-profit gallery space for video art and moving image. The exhibition is open on Saturdays and Sundays, please see the link below for further details. “The starting point of this exhibition was based on my desire for having always wanted to make a horror movie. At many periods of my life, especially busy and stressful ones, I take comfort in throwing on any horror movie, cheesy and predictable with familiar sounds and jump scares. Amongst the many horror tropes one might experience, I particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of police and military being utterly useless. It’s an assumed, natural fact of the characters and by the general audience. I wanted to set my horror movie in a particular style of housing in the Pacific Northwest.” Read more …
2024-10-26	Cici Wu, Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising, Scheusal Berlin
	Cici Wu’s solo exhibition Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising is now on view at Scheusal Berlin from October 26th onwards.
2024-10-25	Jes Fan, Sites of Wounding: Interchapter, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
	Jes Fan’s debut New York solo exhibition is now on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery’s 55 Walker space through December 20, 2024. In his practice, Fan employs the often invisible substances that shape our experiences with the world to explore the often malleable ways in which biology, ecology and identity intersect. Working in close collaboration with biologists, farmers, and medical universities, Fan’s transdisciplinary projects examine how sculpture can be used as a tool to unravel material from its accumulated history. The exhibition continues Fan’s episodic project Sites of Wounding, first initiated in 2020. A pool of boiling soy milk is positioned at the gallery’s entrance, and utilized as a projection surface for a visceral video documenting a homemade endoscopy. Upon looking at the congealed skin-like surface of the white liquid, the viewer is not offered a reflection, but instead offered an interior view of the artist’s body. This underscores a larger interest in Fan’s work, of collapsing the membrane that demarcates the external body from an internal space. New sculptures belonging to the project’s second chapter are informed by Fan’s research into Agarwood trees, as well as an interest in how injuries are capable of generating new meaning. Native to Hong Kong, the trees produce a fragrant resin in response to stress, and trauma. In the healing process, the tree’s fibers harden, building density and structure around the wound. To create sculptures in this chapter, Fan 3D prints CT scans of his own musculature and combines traditional techniques such as glass-blowing. Mimicking the formal qualities of the infected Agarwood tree, these abstracted forms point to the transformative potential of trauma carried by the human body. A punctured freestanding wall furthers this inquiry, inviting viewers to peer at the sculpture embedded within it. Read more …
2024-10-09	Jes Fan in Scientia Sexualis at ICA Los Angeles
	Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose works take up the fraught relationship between sex, gender, and science. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition is realized as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California known as PST ART: Art & Science Collide led by the Getty. It runs from October 5, 2024 through March 2, 2025. Featured artists include: Panteha Abareshi, Dotty Attie, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Andrea Carlson, Demian DinéYazhi’, Nicole Eisenman, El Palomar, dean erdmann, Jes Fan, Nicki Green, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Xandra Ibarra, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Carlos Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Young Joon Kwak & Gala Porras-Kim, Cauleen Smith, P. Staff, Joey Terrill, Chris E. Vargas, Millie Wilson, and Geo Wyex. Read more …
2024-09-27	James T. Hong at Argo Factory, Tehran
	I Am Standing in the Middle of the Information Highway and Laughing is a new exhibition curated by Raha Raissnia and Martin Germann, opening August 16 through October 18 at the Argo Factory in Tehran. Taking its title from late artist Jonas Mekas’ Manifesto Anti-100 years of Cinema, a performative exhibition in Tehran will unfold over two different episodes. Its main aim is to celebrate the unbound energy of collaborative work and friendship on the one hand and moments of reflection and stillness on the other. Its point of departure is the Manichean binary between darkness and light, as sine qua non condition for the existence of technologically mediated images. The second chapter of the exhibition, curated by Martin Germann, opens on Friday, September 27, with Marco Fusinato, James T. Hong, Tiffany Sia and Sam Lewitt. Read more …
2024-09-22	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork in Slipper, Personal Space, Vallejo, California
	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork is participating in the group exhibition Slipper at Personal Space, Vallejo, California, on view through November 24, 2024. Featuring works by: David Bayus, Lemia Monet Bodden, Kari Cholnoky, Ximaps Dong, Erik Frydenborg, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Albert Herter, Catalina Ouyang, and Elina Vainio. “Slipping between registers, like prophesy, some excessive field leaves deposits in our shared existence. It takes form, in the shape of slips of the tongue, or a slipped disc, articulated and yet still monstrous. The environment is overpopulated by tools and weapons that encode our lust or aggression into metal, plastic, or paper, infused with the unspeakable. Here is a collection of objects, of various media, that cannot be fully accounted for, that leave a remainder or lapsus, that aren’t completely discrete, and sit like cairns on a landscape, death’s representatives, recording trajectories between past and future. Marking the differences that matter, that can be utilized to situate oneself and guide a famished party. Small signs, like fragments of fossils, can refer to immensity.” – Albert Herter Read more …