Artists Spotlight: Horatio Hung-Yan Law
Horatio Hung-Yan Law, installation and public artist and educator
Recipient of RACC 2004, 2007 Project Grant; 2005 Intersections Residency: Multnomah County Health Department; Public Art Commissions for Housing Authority of Portland 2003 and Northwest Housing Alternatives 2005 at New Columbia (managed by RACC).
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| Public Art Projects at New Columbia by Horatio Hung-Yan Law, 2005 |
Horatio Hung-Yan Law works in installation and public art. He teaches photography and social art at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Much of his installation work stem from his identity and experience as a US citizen of Asian heritage. Some work explores the history and experience of immigrants in the American West – the sense of dislocation, loss, hope and personal transformation. Other work mirrors our contemporary life of global economy and consumer culture.
Working in public art and community residencies confirms his inclination to make work that engages community and interacts with people from diverse backgrounds. He is attracted to public art’s potential to activate the complex and dynamic relationship between individuals and communities, and to create meaning and metaphor from common cultural materials.
For his 2004 Project Grant, he created Lost & Found (at left) with Portland families that had adopted Chinese children. In the installation, portraits of adopted parents and children are projected on an 8’x8’ screen made of silk rose petals and red thread; a soundtrack of a Buddhist chant plays softly in the background. The installation is a meditation on conflicting issues raised by trans-cultural adoptions: individuals and the collective, uniqueness and commonality, longing and belonging, loss and gain. The screen symbolically and literally stitched the family together, as the screen itself was communally constructed by families and friends over several weeks.
During his Intersection Residency, he collaborated with students of Roosevelt High School and the School Based Health Centers Program of the Multnomah County Health Department. The project, named You Are What You Eat, has video portraits of students talking about the food they brought for the installation, and is projected on all 5 screens simultaneously. The screens are made of zip-loc bags filled with food in 5 particular colors –white, yellow, red, brown and black - corresponding to the stereotypical skin colors. The project celebrates ethnic and cultural diversity of the school, and interrogates the social construction of race and color, and the inter-connection of food, health, identity and ethnicity.
In January of 2007, Horatio Law created a multi-disciplinary installation The all-Americans during his residency at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. He has also completed a series of public art projects at New Columbia in Portland and is currently working on a public art commission for ACRS (Asian Counseling and Referral Service) in Seattle to be completed in Spring 2008.
Horatio will be the feature artist at Portland's Q-Center in September, 2007. He will exhibit work from his 2005 RACC Project Grant about trans-cultural adoption. From September 29 - October 27, 2007 he will participate in the exhibition Contruct/Reconstruct organized by Portland artist/curator Rhoda London at the Cathedral Park Place in St. John.
Horatio will be the South Waterfront Artist-in-Resident (AiR) from May 3 – 31, 2008, as he presents China-on-Willamette. This three-component piece is based on the imaginary potential of how different Portland’s development could have been shaped, had early Chinese immigrants not left Portland due to the anti-Chinese immigration and labor legislations passed by the United States Congress in the early twentieth century. This project was also funded in part by a RACC Project Grant.
Contact Information:
website: www.horatiolaw.com
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RACC Staff to Contact
Mary Bauer
Communications Associate
503.823.5426
mbauer@racc.org
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