Julian Yi-Zhong Hou: Grass Drama

×

Expand

Julian Yi-Jong Hou, "Body Truce," 2019

performance costume, acetone transfer of Thoth Tarot reading printed on silk and cotton handsewn pojagi patchwork robe. 50" x 43" (image byCassandra Cassandra, Toronto)

The term hypnagogia refers to the threshold state between wakefulness and sleep, when the rigidity of conscious thought begins to dissolve into a rich and often hallucinatory haze of sound, image and feeling unconstrained by our usual mental filters. “Hypnagogic” is an apt descriptor for Julian Yi-Jong Hou’s work: it epitomizes both the creative strategies the artist employs to bring it into being, as well as its multi-sensory encounter by viewers. 

Incorporating textiles, sound, performance, spoken word, drawing and sculpture—and often all of these simultaneously—Hou’s practice is expansive and roving. He draws from a rich field of influences, including contemporary psychedelia, diverse spiritual traditions, magic and sacred geometry, various musical and architectural vernaculars, smartphone ergonomics, Orientalist motifs, as well as deep memories (and misrememberings) from his own diasporic childhood. These seemingly disparate points of reference are wound together to create visual, sonic and spatial environments and experiences, such that a hand-dyed, quilted performance garment is also understood as a sound baffle, a digital wallpaper pattern an expansive mindscape and a line of prose an architectural space.

Grass Drama, Hou’s first solo exhibition in a major public gallery, manifests as a vinyl record, a one-night performance and an accompanying suite of printed patterns hung in the street-level windows that wrap the Contemporary Art Gallery’s facade. Hou developed this project over a two-year period, guided by a process of sensitivity training involving divination, hypnagogic practices and expanded states of consciousness, which took place alongside (and within) the slow construction of the artist’s backyard studio-shed and garden. The length of time is significant, Hou suggests, because it echoes the time required for many rhizomatic plants, such as hops or ginger, to mature and bear fruit.