Issue 05
Jung-Il Hong
By Caleb NeelonPhotos By Adam Wallacavage
The creative capital of New England over the past decade ha been Providence, Rhode Island, regardless of whether anyone out side the city has noticed or not. Ten years ago, the city’s center was a crater. Cheap warehouse spaces abounded, and, since nobody seemed to be watching, it was a relatively consequence free environment. Jung-Il Hong arrived in Providence, at the Rhode Island School of Design, in 1995, the same year that a crew of RISD students and dropouts took up residence in the now-demolished warehouse space they called Fort Thunder. Along with former Fort members Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, and others, Jung now shares an enormous factory studio in Providence, where she pours out work in screen prints, collage, sculpture, and installation. Providence is a different place today than it was when Jung arrived: Fort Thunder is a parking lot, luxury apartments seep out from downtown, and a glittering monstrosity of a mall stares down the old city. Of the time when she hit town, Jung recall s, “I definitely felt like Providence was a nice ghost town, which it is not anymore. I loved the buildings and that the downtown emptied out after 5 P. M. But now, with all that stuff gone, I ’m still entangled with all these people.”
“ The people and artists ,” she goes on, “make an intense congregation of super energy in Providence. There’s so much going on, not just socially, but amazing work comes out of here. A lot of the people here I see now I didn’t know at all in school. I feel like I sometimes take it for granted, I have worked so long with people who are so creative. Sometimes I want to be away from the studio, but I bet if I did work alone I’d want to be back.”
Part of Providence’s strength is in its many fluid and multidisciplinary art collectives. Peter Glantz’s Trutheatertheater troupe asked Jung to create a sculpture for a recent performance, and the result was a large tree bearing lantern s, a tree found, says Jung, “in a place called Landturns.” In the Trutheater theater performance, there’s a whole story about the tree, involving a wizard, a staff, and the tree’s fruit, but behind that, the materials of the tree it self are just as revealing.
Get close enough to touch one of Jung’s sculptures and it becomes clear that they are made from plastic shopping bags. With each bag screen printed, then cut into small, petal-like shapes, then sewn together, the material is recognizable but transformed. After college, she took a train trip in India, where “out the window there was this big desert, but up ahead was this beautiful field of blue and white flowers. As I got closer, I saw they weren’t flowers, but a bunch of plastic bags .
“A plastic bag isn’t the nicest looking thing, but it’s so easily transformable. I just didn’t understand why plastic bags were used the way they were used, or unused; it seemed like a lot of wasted energy. I was trying to fight small battles and be a little more conscious about the overuse of plastic bags whens hopping.
I started to use them and sew them out of not having a lot of money for materials – every house you go into has a drawer full of plastic bags, like a graveyard.” That the bags are such an environmental poison even makes them a good art medium. Since the bags don’t decompose, they’re oddly archival, and Jung’s thousands of carefully stitched petals can make for a visible reminder to that graveyard in everyone’s drawer at home.
“I love repetition,” explains Jung, and certainly all the cutting, sorting, printing, and sewing of the bags into innumerable petals is a long task. However, repetition is in the air at the Providence studio they call Hilarious Attic. With silk- screened prints lining the walls and scattered on floors and table sin various stages of being trimmed and collaged, there’s repetition all over, both in the repeated patterns of the distinctive prints and in the multiples of the prints created. For Jung and her studio mates, it’s a constant cycle of inspiration, in the face of shrinking amounts of affordable space in Providence. “I get spoiled. I want more new things to keep coming in, more creative things. I always look forward to having that one person come through our work space and just blow my mind. It would just be so amazing if we could have more space and land to work with.”