Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA is proud to present Keeping Score, an exhibition featuring large-scale works by Hong Hong and Johnathan Payne, curated by Alex Paik. For both of these artists, paper itself is a living, breathing support, carrying with it the various environmental and material processes that have been imposed upon it. Hong Hong takes material from both the local environment where she is making her paper as well as material from her family history and uses those to create monumental hand-made paper works. Johnathan Payne builds his quilt-like scaffolds from shredded comic books, using both the found imagery from the material as well layered geometric patterns to complicate the standard intersections of a Cartesian grid. Through their work we see the elusive and constantly shifting relationships between one’s lived experience, environment, and personal journey and how that affects the formation and re-formation of identity.
image: Hong Hong
Born in 1989 in Hefei, Anhui, China, Hong Hong earned her BFA from State University of New York at Potsdam (2011) and MFA from University of Georgia (2014). Since 2015, she has travelled to faraway locations across the US to create site-responsive, monumental paperworks. In this nomadic practice, traditional methods of Chinese papermaking coalesces with painting, monastic rituals, and feminist performances. These works have been included in exhibitions at Sarasota Museum of Art, Real Art Ways, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Georgia Museum of Art, Penland School of Crafts, Artspace New Haven, Lawndale Art Center and Jewett Art Center, among others. Hong is the recipient of grants and fellowships at NEA (2019), FCA (2015, 2020), MacDowell (2020), Yaddo (2019), McColl Center for Art and Innovation (2022), Vermont Studio Center (2019), I-Park (2019), and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2020 – 2021). Hong currently divides her time between New York and Massachusetts.
Johnathan Payne (he/him) is a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He obtained a BA in art from Rhodes College in 2012 and received his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2018. Recent exhibitions of Payne’s work include The Bridge to Uncertainty at Beeler Gallery at the Columbus College of Art and Design (2021; Columbus, OH), Threads at Foxy Production (2021; New York, NY), and Miss Lizzie’s Lattice at Deli Gallery (2020; Brooklyn, NY). He is featured in New American Paintings (MFA Annual #135), and has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Observer, and Vice. Payne was a Spring 2020 Artist-in-Residence at Crosstown Arts in Memphis, TN, and was the 2020-22 recipient of the Grant Wood Fellowship in Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa. Payne was the inaugural recipient of the Aminah Residency in summer 2021, named after the late Columbus-based artist and MacArthur Grant recipient Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.
