A cloud is a wonderfully unruly thing. Always gathering and dispersing, it has density without solidity, volume and contours that change almost as soon as we recognize them. In 雯 Wen, Julia Hung’s first U.S. solo exhibition, delicate copper wire sculptures take on the visual language of weather, evoking clouds, drifting currents, and the mutable bodies of marine creatures. Fine strands of copper in pink, turquoise, violet, and pale gold twist, loop, and overlap, forming ethereal silhouettes with shifting concentrations of color and translucency. Some expand into billowing masses, while others taper into narrow extensions, curl, swell, and unravel in unexpected directions.
The resemblance to colorful clouds holds a deeply personal significance for Hung, whose Chinese birth name, 雯 Wen, describes precisely these atmospheric patterns. The character combines 雨, meaning rain, with 文, meaning pattern or markings, to evoke clouds that are patterned or many colored. As a child, Hung resisted this name, as it seemed to carry her family’s expectations of who she ought to become. After moving abroad, she began using Julia, finding in its relative anonymity a freedom from those expectations. Years later, she finds herself unexpectedly returning to her birth name and its evocative imagery. It is as though she has instinctively found her way back to 雯 Wen, giving the name she once set aside a form and shape of her own.
Hung meticulously crochets and handweaves fine copper wire into an intricate, translucent mesh that resembles lace, fabric, or delicate organic tissue. The open structure allows colors to mingle, for instance, a pink loop seen through a turquoise one, produces a fleeting third hue, visible only from a particular angle. Through this interplay of wire, light, and empty space, Hung transforms the apparent weight and rigidity of metal into something airy, supple, and almost weightless. The sculptures occupy considerable volume with relatively little material, their forms defined as much by the wires as by the spaces between them.
Hung’s practice finds an art historical precedent in the work of Ruth Asawa, whose pioneering wire sculptures similarly transform an industrial material into delicate, transparent volumes. Hung’s handwoven and crocheted structures, however, construct a stylistic language and logic of their own with chromatic exuberance, organic irregularity, looseness of line and undulating contours.
The effortless ethereal quality of Hung’s sculptures belies the painstaking labor through which they come into being. Each form is built through innumerable gestures, transforming the resistance of metal into something pliable, open, and unpredictable. A similar negotiation between what is given and what can be transformed informs Hung’s return to 雯 Wen. One may argue that Hung quite literally makes some thing of it, asserting her agency through the act of making and giving shape to what once sought to shape her.