HOANG POW!

“Alex” by David Hoang
14” x 11”
Walnut Ink & Watercolor on Paper
$225

For our 4th installation of POW (piece of the week), we are featuring my favorite piece from artist David Hoang, "Alex". This work is part of our Urban Portraiture exhibition which is showing through Friday, July 2nd. To hear more about his series for this exhibition, he has a video about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3aXq80dKq4


Artist Bio

David Hoang explores the foundations of popular culture, de-contextualization, re-contextualization and convergence. Hoang’s work investigates other influential modes of story telling – comic books, film, gossip, literature, music, social media, television, and video games – as they relate to one’s understanding of identity and worldview. Like a DJ, he mixes and re-mixes his materials to create visually representative narratives on the picture plane. Through drawing and painting, Hoang perpetually explores his bicultural upbringing and ethnocentric influences – interweaving experience, understanding, and exploration.

David Hoang was born in Longview, Washington in 1983. He is of Vietnamese and French descent, and is a first-generation American. He received his BFA in painting at Central Washington University in 2006. Hoang’s work is shown nationally throughout the United States. He currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington.


Artist Statement

I am two parts cultural ecologist, one part DJ. My drawings are a repository for other influential modes of storytelling: literature, film, music, television, gossip, text messages, myth, inside jokes, video games, comic books, personal experience and the occasional romantic walk on the beach. I find the picture plane to be a flexible reality in which I can use original and existing icons and images to ask questions about how narrative relates to one’s understanding the self (identity) and one’s understanding the world (worldview).