Chinese American Art Council/ Gallery 456 is pleased to present PUZZLE BREATHING, an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Ying Hung. In this collection of recent work, Hung has developed a visual language to explore themes around change and temporality. Each work can be viewed as a microcosm of a personal and metaphysical environment in which emotions, memories, and history collide or merge in puzzle-like patterns.

Much of Hung’s work is an ongoing investigation into “constructing forms while deconstructing reality. The artist’s use of textured strokes or surfaces lend the pieces a humanistic quality while a pervasive overlapping and juxtaposing of lines, shapes, and motifs elicit a sense of shifting spaces and motion.

Simultaneously, the picture or object is frozen in a point in time, and the fragments and pieces that appear before the eyes suggest a world that’s partially and purposely concealed. What one cannot see remains a deepening mystery throughout the exhibit, and Hung employs all of the above techniques to create a complex sensory experience.

PUZZLE BREATHING captures a mysterious realm and its evolving environment; like photos or mementos from a journey, the totality of the experience is delimited to what can be rendered or brought back in physical form. Paradoxically, these parameters allow the viewer to transcend them, and Hung’s skillful construction of boundaries intensifies the exhibit’s overall allusion: A multitude of worlds puzzle in and out of the eye’s view, and they continue to transform and exist regardless of our human reality.

Ying Hung is a New York-based artist who received her MFA from Pratt Institute. Ying has been awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. She is widely shown in the US and internationally. She participated in the Art Biennale hosted by the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1983, and her work has been shown in New York, including PSI (1990), the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2000) and Nars Foundation (2022). Since 1994, Hung has also held group and solo exhibitions in major museum and galleries in Taiwan, such as Turning Gazes: Woman and Arts in Dialogue (2013) at the Juming Museum, Perpetual Journey (2010), Mind and Matter: Derivation (2019) and Plus IV (2021) at Tina Keng Gallery.