I’m back home in Vancouver now and I must say, it was really lovely to return to what feels like summer after a premature winter for me in Reykjavik. I was afraid I had skipped a season and gone straight from summer into winter, so it’s good to be home and still enjoy the last bit of a late warm summer.
Before I left for my residency in Iceland, I was organizing my sketches of pretty boys and thinking about putting together a little book. At the time, with so much to do before I left on my trip, I didn’t give it much more thought than a possibility for a future project at a later date. While I was in Reykjavik, however, I came across a great printer and a little art book shop, and one thing led to another, and I created a limited edition run of small artist books from my pretty boy sketches.
It was a lot of fun making this little book, and I feel like it’s a precursor to possibly a larger book project that may develop from this body of work. I’m hoping to get it into a couple of art book shops, as I’ve left a few copies in Reykjavik for sale and would like to make them available in more cities, including Vancouver. They are also available for purchase on my website. The print run is a limited edition of 50 + 6 artist proofs, and each book is numbered on the back.
Here is a preview of the book’s pages:
A full preview of all the pages is available on my Tumblr blog.
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Since returning home to Vancouver, I was also able to pick up a copy of The Georgia Straight, with the review of the Surrey Art Gallery exhibition that both mentions and features my painting in print.
I’ve scanned the page of the paper and you can read it back clicking the image below.
In the review, art critic Robin Laurence writes:
Hung uses both personal snapshots and art-historical portraiture as source material for small, highly realistic oil paintings of herself, which she renders with exquisite facility. Some of these portraits, such as She wanted to do more than just pass…, are allegorical and clearly modelled on art-historical precedents (in this case, Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Woman With Unicorn). Others, such as Self-Portrait (The Past Five Years), explore the ways that contemporary lives are densely documented by incidental photographs.
Part of what’s interesting in Hung’s imagery is the tension between the incidental and the labour-intensive, the ephemeral and the lasting. In fact, that existential tension occurs in most of the self-portraits in Scenes of Selves. Eventually, death will take us all out—and time will pretty much obliterate whatever means we choose to represent ourselves.
To read the rest of the review, please visit The Georgia Straight’s website here. I have yet to go see the exhibition myself, as it opened while I was away, but I intend to go soon as I’m excited to see how everything looks in the space. For those who haven’t made it out to the Surrey Art Gallery, I fully recommend visiting this space as it is one of the best galleries in the Lower Mainland and the exhibitions are always well curated. I will be taking part in a panel discussion next month – more news to follow….