3-A Gallery, CICA Museum
February 22-26, 2023
2023.02.22-26
IN THY BLOOD
In Thy Blood is a photo series that captures the generational ties between the women in my family, concentrating on how closely health, womanhood, and femininity has intertwined throughout our lives. The project explores the themes of familial past, health, womanhood, and other intimate topics through the mixture of photographic mediums of the family archive and digital images of photographing products that are associated or commonly used by women. The project is a reflection of how the environment and society can have a generational impact on women, families, and the individual.
Haelyn
Unfamiliar name
A name that is only spoken throughout the tongues of my grandparents’
A shadow of my name that has yet to see the day
A name I keep hidden…
홍해린
Many Asian Americans have faced rejection from Western society due to their experiences with xenophobia, racism, etc., and often feel excluded from the Western country in which they were born. Thus, many turn to their motherland to seek belonging and comfort in their cultural identity from their native lands. However, many feel unwelcome in their homeland due to their own country’s nationalist values and ideals. Some native Asians believe that Asian Americans have
“abandoned” their country, thus viewing them as “other” or foreigners. The ongoing project Hidden Haelyn depicts the exploration and the sense of “loss” of the Korean American identity through the interaction between the artist’s sculptures and herself through self-portraits. The paper mache sculptures are made out of Hanji paper, depicting a Tal (a traditional Korean play mask) and a Bojaji (a traditional Korean wrapping cloth). These traditional Korean objects confront the artist, thus she must interact and question her cultural identity. The diptych displays the positive and inverse negative of the same image, revealing the complexity and loss of the Asian American experience and identity.
Abbigail Hong is from Ellicott City, MD and has graduated from NYU Tisch studying photography and minored in East Asian studies. Her practice specializes in documentary and photojournalism, with an emphasis on themes surrounding identity, culture, femininity, and religion. She mainly works with digital and
occasionally analog as her main medium. Some of her series have included exploring Asian American identity, documenting familial ties through womanhood, focusing on photographing social issues. Her series, “One Way Ticket to the American Dream” is a part of the“Migration and Meaning(s) in Art” exhibition at the MICA. And her piece, “All of God’sChildren” was displayed at the Microscope Gallery and at the Senior Show Two at NYU Tisch
School of the Arts, in part of the “New York University Photography & Imaging Senior Show 2022”. The series, ‘Hidden Haelyn’ has been featured in the ESPERENZA Project Space in part of the ‘To/From the Motherland(s)’ virtual exhibition. In her free time, she is a teacher’s assistant for the Digital Photography for Preteens at ICP at THE POINT at the International Center of Photography (ICP). She is a recipient of the Thomas Drysdale Grant and is now based in Brooklyn.
