Ray Hwang (b.1992) is an artist from LA, living and working out of Ridgewood, NY. His work consists primarily of acrylic painting and drawing, in which he abstracts and layers imagery from his personal history to explore themes of family, home and inter-cultural contradiction. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and has since exhibited throughout New York City and internationally. He has been featured in Art Maze Magazine, Vast Magazine, and has been a recipient of the Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY), the Plum Lime Residency (Brooklyn, NY), and the Moosey Residency (Norwich, UK). He has shown with Tube Culture Hall (Milan, Italy), LaiSun Keane Gallery (Boston, MA), 81 Leonard Gallery (New York, NY), and at Spring/Break Art Show (New York, NY). He has had solo exhibitions at Latitude Gallery (New York, NY) and Tempest (Ridgewood, NY) and is currently a member of the gallery and curatorial collective Below Grand on the Lower East Side in NY.
"My paintings are both burials and excavations created through a process of layering familiar forms and symbols using collage, airbrush, and traditional brushwork. Operating like seasoned actors in an unrehearsed play, images materialize, hide, overlap and fade away. The paintings come into existence one move at a time, each decision reacting to the last. By utilizing negative space to articulate form, I define presence through absence - memories bubble up and make themselves known, and in the end, what is left is an abstracted, unearthed emotional history of my own making.
In recent works, I’ve chosen to incorporate materials like Joss paper, a type of paper traditionally folded into currency and burned in a ritualistic manner. With its intended associations to value, destruction, and familial care, the paper serves my painting methods both aesthetically and symbolically.
Chase the Rabbit is a show centered around using light and shadow to communicate the connections between the abstracted artifacts within the ritualistic space of the paintings. Using the structure of a shrine as armature and soft, illuminative candlelight as a visual device, I’m exploring how these elements work amongst each other in subtle ways to create an uncanny sense of both comfort and uneasiness."
