Holly Wong
Biography
Holly Wong creates suspended sculptures and collaged paintings that explore healing and resilience. As an artist working in the field of installation art with a strong emphasis on place-making works for public spaces, Wong frequently integrates the outside world of nature into the interior space. She has extensive experience collaborating with arts and educational institutions, businesses and local stakeholders on two- and three-dimensional projects that enhance connection to place and create dynamic atmospheres for communities. Working with a variety of materials including translucent acrylic and shaped aluminum, Wong creates site specific projects responding to each unique environment.
Wong was educated at the San Francisco Art Institute where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in New Genres and Interdisciplinary Practice in 1995. She has participated in over 100 exhibitions, including group shows at the de Young Museum, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. A Presidential Scholar in the Arts, she has received grants from the California Arts Council (Established Artist Fellow category), the Puffin Foundation, the George Sugarman Foundation, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the George Family Center for Healing Arts at Rowan University, Metro National corporation, Texas Medical Center, Houston, Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company, and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.
Since 2019, she has created site specific installations and assemblages that integrate the elements of the environments where she places these works. Her first permanent installation was Silent Music, which was initially installed at Evanston Art Center in Illinois, and ultimately purchased by Metro National corporation for a lobby at one of their properties in Houston in 2023. For this piece, she created a suspended, light reflective work that spanned the ceiling space of the lobby, integrating the canopy tree elements of the landscape around the building.
Wong also created a temporary site-specific work for San Francisco Art Market 2023 at the Fort Mason Pavilion titled Body of Light. She designed a suspended installation of quilt fabric in silks and netting, integrating LED strip light elements to play off the water and sky elements in the surrounding windows of the mezzanine space where the work was installed. This installation was enjoyed by many attendees of the art fair as it integrated the beautiful aquatic elements of the San Francisco Bay through the use of transparent fabrics.
Most recently, Wong created Hydra which is made with drawing by hand on rigid but organically curved heat-formed acrylic. She worked with fabricators to create the solid forms, and to consult with experts on hanging methods. The result is a piece that is very lightweight and translucent but can be customized and expanded to fill a large space. It was created in response to the magic of underwater sea life as Wong lives very close to the Pacific Ocean and Hydra is thus inspired by its color, sound and movement.
Wong is passionate about pushing public art’s potential to strengthen connection to place, encourage engagement, and create uplifting and thought-provoking experiences for visitors.
Artist Statement
I make painted collages on aluminum, in addition to fiber and drawing-based installations that range in size from three feet high to room size immersive environments, exploring healing and resilience.
My collaged works on shaped aluminum are layered drawings and paintings that form densely nested worlds of pattern. I start initially with drawing, often basing my images on medical or crime scene photography. The images explore the notion of the wound but then the layering of color and the fluidness of the ink mediums produce an organic overlay. I utilize this layering as a way of nature reclaiming and growing over the pain, producing a beautiful scar.
My work is situated in the work of the Pattern and Decoration movement, second wave feminist artists, the California Light and Space movement, and the rich alternative history of quilt making, and craft. In my work, I am driven to memorialize my mother whom I lost to alcoholism and domestic violence, and to help provide a healing space for people who face violence without recourse. I draw and sew as a journey towards wholeness, both for myself and for my mother’s memory. My work seeks to reclaim the female body and bear witness to the spirit by emphasizing the vibrancy of pattern and flow. Creating works of beauty in brokenness is my highest form of resistance.
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