HELLO! 你好!
PHAAN HOWNG
b. Providence, Rhode Island, 1982
Phaan Howng creates lush paintings and immersive installations that tease a post-human ecology defensively brandishing its landscape–what she calls an “optimistic post-apocalypse.” Her portraits of dense vegetal matter, often appearing both luridly seductive and ominously aggressive and alien, “choke out” the picture plane, obscuring what may lurk behind it to captivate the viewer, just as certain plants seduce pollinators--and even us.
The viewscapes in her paintings are based on her desire to understand human aspirations to manipulate, control, and contain plants, as opposed to just living with them. She is fascinated with how plants can create the facade of a healthy environment, camouflaging colonialist legacies and the slow violence of human environmental disruptions. Her work is informed by her research into Victorian botanical and ecological history, including botanical gothic literature. She applies her own humor and a satirical lens on current cultural trends to create speculative narrative futures, endeavoring to make austere topics around the environment more approachable and relatable. She believes that our past actions have created superficial relationships with plants today, contributing to the current ecological crises and inability to thwart climate change, and that reevaluating human/plant relationships through history can give us the understanding required to be ecological stewards who can make the changes needed to live in balance with our environment.
Howng lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. She received her BFA from Boston University and her MFA from the Mt. Royal School of Art at MICA. Her installations have been presented at institutions such as the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), Smithsonian Gardens (Washington D.C.), the Smithsonian Arts and Industry Museum (Washington D.C.), MoCA Arlington (Arlington, VA), and the Asian Arts and Culture Center (Towson, MD). She had solo and two-person exhibitions at Dinner Gallery (New York, NY), Practice Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), MonoPractice (Baltimore, MD) and was featured in a solo booth at the 2023 Armory Show (New York, NY). Her work has also been written about in various publications such as The New York Times T List, The American Scholar, Artnet, Maake Magazine, Bmore Art Magazine, and the front page of the Baltimore Sun.
Baltimore Sun
Artnet
Maake Magazine
Smithsonian Magazine
City of Artists-Bmore Art Magazine
