Category Archives: Featured Artists

Brooklynline (ARCHITECTURAL TOPOGRAPHIES, 2002–present) is the eighth segment in a larger series involving the inscription of topographic lines upon architectural space.

Hong Chun Zhang’s descriptions of hair in charcoal, here in a diptych of two scrolls (“Twin Spirits I”), are large and realistic portraits of Zhang and her twin sister, impressive in technique and imposing scale (each four by ten feet). And as the only representational drawings in “Infinite Line”, their content, and concepts, enter with greater force. Zhang has a clear desire to establish these works contextually. Hair is unusual; while the rest of the visible body is built and destroyed vertically, layers sloughed and rebuilt, hair speaks in linear narrative, growth inscribing history. Zhang’s body of work is primarily dedicated to her own cultural history, family and ancestry, and these drawings are a frontispiece, working as resounding physical records.

In the gallery Gallery I was reminded of a chapter in Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 film Kwaidan, a retelling of Japanese folk tales. “The Black Hair” is a story of a selfish and cruel samurai, who leaves his wife to seek wealth, but eventually returns to her and her exceptional black hair full of guilt for his misdeeds. Naturally fate steps in: he finds her a ghost with the same perfect locks, who then kills him in revenge for his cruelty. The narrative is centered on the wife’s hair, which is the cause of his obsession, torment, love, and death. Zhang’s work likely has nothing to do with Kwaidan, but like Kobayashi’s ghost-hair, her use of disembodied hair is weirdly resounding. H; hair detached from a feminine self serves only to amplify femininity — in sexuality, and strength — through absence. It’s this sort of conceptual subtlety that makes Zhang’s work far more earnest than surreal.
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