By Lauren Skelton | Mississippi State student
Ming Hong has an art exhibit entitled “Disjunction and Other Works” on display until Feb. 19 at Western Illinois University. The exhibition began Jan. 19.
Hong is an assistant art professor in the College of Architecture, Art and Design at Mississippi State University. She specializes in traditional drawing practices and drawing in an expanded arena.
She has 12 drawings on display in the nationally juried show.
"My work explores the limits of our knowledge and experience by questioning the way we define and categorize states of being," she said. "Bodily forms are depicted as masculine and feminine, dead and alive, aggressive and delicate. Explosions, another common motif, teeter on the razor-thin edge of dissolution and whole. By combining these seemingly contradictory elements together, opposites which once defined each other overlap, ultimately dismantling the system in which one definition is privileged over another. Masculinity no longer prevails over the feminine; strength no longer prevails over the delicate; and stability no longer prevails over the broken. Instead, the work encourages us to examine the in-between spaces of these binaries—the spaces that fall outside of our clear-cut definitions and hierarchies. In examining these areas of uncertainty, a more complex spectrum of experience emerges."