Artist Statement

Jason Kwong explores how identity, memory, and cultural characteristics are reshaped through migration, material translation, and spatial negotiation. Rooted in an enduring emotional connection to Hong Kong, his practice approaches identity not as a fixed origin but as a relational and continuously reassembled condition. Influenced by Dansaekhwa, his background in calligraphy, and an ongoing reflection on the role of materiality in shaping identity, Kwong works intensively with ink and Xuan paper, foregrounding labour, repetition, and material resistance. His process exposes the friction between pigment, fibre, diffusion, and time. Ink and Xuan paper, often perceived as stable cultural carriers, are treated instead as mutable structures shaped by environmental forces and physical intervention. By destabilising these cultural signifiers and reinterpreting traditional craft through a contemporary lens, alongside the use of technologies such as 3D printing, his work repositions material as an active site of transformation. Through soaking, layering, casting, tearing, and sanding, surfaces retain visible traces of change, situating the work between painting, sculpture, and installation. His recent project, “Rooting Temporary, Drifting Eternity”, approaches diasporic experience as a state of distributed existence. Identity here emerges not from a stable centre but from shifting relations among materials, nodes, and contexts. By articulating identity as something communal within individual experience, Kwong is committed to creating work that fosters both unity and individuality within a polarised society, while preserving endangered identities. Through restrained gestures and complex production processes, Kwong constructs installations that resist narrative closure. The works invite viewers into a spatial field shaped by labour, duration, and negotiation, where stability remains conditional, and belonging is in continuous motion.