By Charles Whiting
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Baltimore artist Phaan Howng creates artwork that centers around landscapes that show the planet thriving in a post-human future. Now, she’s bringing her gallery that she describes as an “optimistic post-apocalypse” to the Asian Arts Gallery on the campus of Towson University.
The exhibition is titled “A Bag of Rocks for a Bag of Rice” and the gallery originally made its debut at the Towson Asian Arts and Culture Center Sept. 17, 2020, but due to COVID-19 restrictions the exhibition was not open to the general public.
Used with permission.
“A Bag of Rocks for a Bag of Rice” features a painted landscape of a mountain range that visitors can walk through as if they were immersed in the landscape, a rock garden and a painting that resembles a traditional Chinese landscape painting.
“In Phaan’s work I see the results of deep philosophical inquiry around how humans interact with Earth’s environment,” said Baltimore artist and Howng’s husband Malcolm Majer. “The work she creates can be dark, cynical and at the same time playful.”
The title of her exhibit is inspired by the Italo Calvino essay, The Obverse of the Sublime, where Calvino wrote about a tour of a Zen garden he experienced in Kyoto and discovered the human exploitation behind the garden. The stones in the Zen garden were brought from every part of Japan when the emperor rewarded anyone who brought him a bag of stones with a bag of rice.
Joanna Pecore, director of the Asian Arts Gallery, reached out to Howng in 2018. She described Howng’s work as beautiful, expressive, engaging and impactful.
“Her work is well-known throughout Baltimore and beyond,” Pecore said. “I saw a photo of her installation at the Baltimore Museum of Art and knew we had to ask her to create a show for us.”
Howng is not only an Asian American artist, but her work addresses many of the goals of the Asian Arts and Culture Center.
“The Asian Arts and Culture Center’s mission encompasses a broad range of interrelated goals,” Pecore said, “from showcasing the arts and culture of Asian and Asian American artists to bringing attention to global issues through art. Inviting Phaan to create a site-specific work for us was, as they say, a no brainer.”
Howng worked on this exhibition over the course of the summer of 2020, but she didn’t know how or if the gallery was going to happen.
“For a while it was touch and go because of COVID,” Howng said. “The director is like ‘I don’t know if the gallery is going to shut down completely.’ We have no idea, like no foresight. Are we going to have it online? Are we going to be able to see the show?”
Howng struggled with how she was going to be able to bring her idea to life. This particular exhibition touches on labor issues and deconstructing East Asian gardens.
“How do you do that?” Howng said. “Like, that’s only an essay you can write. I finally got to that point and I had like a solid two months of just 40-to-50-hour work weeks just banging it out and just like hating life for a bit. But that’s usually how it goes.”
Typically, Howng creates artwork that after its finished being displayed, she “hoards forever” or deconstructs, but she’s hoping that the “A Bag of Rocks for a Bag of Rice” exhibit will have a longer shelf life than some of her previous work.
“For this particular one, I was hoping to have it travel to other galleries and stuff,” Howng said. “I need it to not be stuck in the Mid-Atlantic region.”
The exhibit will be on display through May 15 and guests can see it in person via appointment.
Growing up in New Mexico and Florida, Howng’s interest in exploring landscapes and human relationships with nature began early in her life.
“I was always fascinated by man’s motivation to manipulate nature,” Howng said. “Especially through the lens of maintaining one’s yard. I think a lot of that had to do with my father and, while growing up, seeing him always maintaining his yard the way he aesthetically sees fit.”
As a kid, Howng liked to draw but she didn’t think she would grow up to be an artist.
“My parents definitely didn’t say you can just become a painter,” Howng said. “It was just become an engineer or like classical stereotypical jobs that Asian parents want you to have. I remember being really scared to tell my dad that I’m going to go this path of like being jobless or like a bohemian, but it worked out.”
Howng went on to study art at Boston University and graduated in 2004. After college, it took a lot of networking to put herself out there and get to where she is now.
“What I tell students, because I teach a professional practices class for artists at MICA, a lot of it is just go to galleries, go network, go for the community, go be with your people,” Howng said.
After college, Howng went on to take a job at Foxconn, an electronics manufacturer. This job influenced how she thinks about landscape.
“I really hated working there,” Howng said. “But the experience did make me rethink different ways of visualizing landscape through the implications of manufacturing and receive the hard lessons about extraction of raw materials from the earth.”
These lessons can be seen in her work today as she focuses on post-apocalyptic work that results from human exploitation of the earth.
Howng is now an established artist residing in Baltimore, Maryland, where she works out of her art studio, keeping up with the grind that is being an artist.
“Some people like working out at the gym,” Howng said. “This is like my gym.”