Phaan Howng: Twilight
Phaan Howng Twilight
December 2, 2022 - January 28, 2023
Receptions: First Fridays 12/2 and 1/6
6:00-10:00 pm
Twilight is a continuation of Phaan Howng’s current exploration into ecological conditions brought on by globalization and capitalism throughout the history of horticulture. This current exploration has led her to create a multi-series of works that focus on popular house plants evolving into killer plants after realizing they have been displaced, contained, cultivated, objectified, and commodified. For this iteration, Twilight draws upon short stories written by nineteenth century gothic writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, H.G. Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Nesbit, about killer plants. Howng titled this body of work after the vampire-themed fantasy series, Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, because of its narrative parallels to these gothic tales –- infatuation, obsession, butchery, heroism, and the implausibility yet possibility of these things really ever happening –- but mostly because it’s funny.
Phaan Howng is a Baltimore-based Tawianese American multidisciplinary artist who uses large-scale landscape paintings, sculptures, installations, and performance to place audiences in an idealized or satirical imagined future to encourage reflection on current toxic ecological practices and extractive global capitalism. Explorations in current philosophy, anthropology, and history, ground these investigations that interrogate Western concepts of nature, the human, and time.
Howng received her BFA in Painting from Boston University (2004) and her MFA from the Mt. Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute of College of Art (2015). Howng has mounted solo exhibitions and site-specific projects in major establishments such as the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD 2017-2018), the Smithsonian Arts and Industry Museum (Washington D.C. 2018), Spring Break Art Show (New York, NY 2019) Art Kiosk (Redwood City, CA 2019), Facebook (Washington D.C. 2019), The Asian Arts and Culture Center at Towson University (Towson, MD 2020), and Dinner Gallery, (New York, NY, 2022). She is also a 2017 Rubys Artist Project Grant recipient in Media Arts and Performing Arts and a 2019 Belle Foundation Grant recipient. Howng currently is the Stewart McMillian Endowed Chair for Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD.
