Ran Hwang’s environments transport us to feelings, places, and concepts we find familiar and new.

As a first-world woman in the second decade of the 21st century, it may at times be hard to imagine that a “woman’s work” is still very much at the center of most working women’s days.

Work that involves, needles, pins, thread and buttons is not the stuff of high concept or great economic value, until perhaps it finds its way into the hands of a couturier or fine artist.

Ran Hwang’s hand startles us with skill, scale and her connection to process. Her installations transcend laborious tedium, and become bigger-than-life, dreamlike worlds.

Hwang says:

My immense wall installations are extremely time consuming and repetitive manual work. This is a form of meditative practice that helps me find my inner peace. Pins are used to hold buttons onto the surface to form a silhouetted image, or to disintegrate such image. No adhesive is used so the buttons are free to stay and move, which implies the genetic human tendency to be irresolute. I use buttons because they are common and ordinary, like the existence of human beings.

 “By hammering thousands of pins onto a wall, I discover significance of existence. Like the monks practicing Zen facing the wall, my work is a form of performance that leads to finding oneself.”

As we gaze upon her patterns and environments, it is hard not to think of the hours of hand work involved. The fact that Hwang exhibits at a prestigious Swiss gallery, has been reviewed by prominent art critics, and continues to produce critically acclaimed work is not lost on the viewer.  Hwang entices us with her personal meditations and tactile visual language.  The work grants us our own visual meditation, leading to an appreciation for her ability to transcend simple materials, boredom, and our own perceptions.

Images Kashya Hildebrand & Ran Hwang

Eco, trends, art, creativity and how they tumble through social media to shape culture fascinate EcoSalon columnist Dominique Pacheco. Her personal blog, mixingreality, speaks to these topics daily, and here at EcoSalon, she takes a weekly look at the intersection of eco and art. We call it heARTbeat.

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