Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2022 - Student interview - 02. Jessica Hong

JESSICA HONG: Hi, my name is Jessica Hong, and I studied visual arts at Presbyterian Ladies College, Sydney. So, in formal terms, my body of work is about the misalignment between perception and reality. But from the get-go, I knew I really wanted to pay homage to my trans-cultural experience with my Chinese and Vietnamese heritage. And so, I drew a lot of inspiration from traditional pottery and incorporated the main tones of cobalt blue into my major work.

I think from the very beginning, I really wanted to challenge myself and explore something that I really hadn't done before. And I was playing it safe throughout my younger years of high school with acrylics and watercolour. And I really wanted to dabble into oil paints and different mediums such as clay.

In the beginning, just taking pictures of my sister, who is the main character of this body of work, and just taking pictures of pottery, just smashing pottery, just really experimenting with different kinds of compositions that could come to mind. And through that process, I was really able to develop a unique set of compositions that were all different yet all were tied together with the same colour palette. For the compositions themselves, I was really inspired by the photographer Zhong Lin.

She had a 365-day photography project, and I really drew inspiration from the way she captured each individual in her photographs and how she played with different objects in those images and really focused on a certain tone and colour in each photograph. So, in the first artwork that you see, there is a depiction of a girl in a tank with fragments of a bowl in the tank, and for me, that really represents the fragmented cultural experience throughout my life and how my Western and Eastern experiences really never clashed but they all were in the same pool at the same time.

So, the next painting is a portrait of my sister whose reflection is split across a water surface, which also can be interpreted as a mirror. The bubbles left on the face really signify how the water is now disjointed, and that is a reflection of my own experience and the disjointed experiences that I have felt throughout my own life. The 2 smaller paintings are a more literal approach to my concept. They starkly depict the actual fragments themselves as opposed to portraiture.

The heads coming out of the bowls was actually my very first composition that I came up with. I was just playing around with Photoshop and anything that I could do. And for me, that really represents how I am integrated into my own culture, but the surrounding is quite empty and how I'm placed within this world that I'm quite physically far into but have always grown up in.

So, the fragments of actual clay, ceramics were inspired by the actual bowls that I had in my own kitchen. And they were actually a very last-minute idea. I did them only a couple of weeks before it was due just to really tie everything together. And I just really wanted to have fun with this project. I didn't want to case myself in to just solely painting, and I really wanted to show myself to be a multidisciplinary artist.

And so, I really wanted to play around with some dry clay and go back to my roots with acrylic paints as well. So, getting into ARTEXPRESS was something that I never really expected. And so, I really couldn't wrap my head around that my major work was actually curated into the show. But I think actually seeing my works being displayed to the public really gave me a lot of comfort and confidence in my own work and my ability to actually create works that could resonate with not only myself but others as well.

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