HONMI (Bryan Hon Ting Wong and Namhi Kwun)

2024 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts
More about the artist

BALCONIES BALCONIES BALCONIES

February 16 – March 29, 2024
Materials: Aluminum, Plywood, Paint, Print on Paper, Plastic

MIT Rotch Library and Deer Island

Supported by the Council for the Arts at MIT

A balcony provides a very peculiar type of sociality in buildings. Oscillating between personal and public, it is neither oversharing nor withdrawing into complete seclusion.

Regionally, balconies manifest in diverse adaptations. The Baltic boast soviet balconies with personalized features such as extended walls and fabrics, catering both privacy and thermal comfort. The Mediterranean elaborate historic balconies into vibrant social hubs, serving as communal bars and doubling as stages for performances. The Korean treats their balconies as front doors for logistics and moving furniture. Inspired by these social and spatial nuances inherent in balconies, HONMI have studied eight different types of balconies around the world and is bringing these distinct qualities back in the MIT campus.

Reimagining a “new” balcony, that is not the construction of an extended platform from a façade but rather as the conversion of in-between spaces into a “balcony-like” setting that is both interior and exterior, natural and artificial.

MIT’s main campus presents numerous opportunities for these interventions. Particularly where the brick wall and window of building 7 meets the Rotch Library, the wall, previously an exterior façade sat right beside the elevator facing inward to the library, became a site that could be converted into a place of gathering and sharing.

BALCONIES BALCONIES BALCONIES present research of eight balconies in eight buildings, with eight stories written in eight zines and an eight-pointed asterisk table for eight faculty and students.


2024 Schnitzer Prize Recipient HONMI’s Balconies Balconies Balconies performed in Deer Island. Credit: Jei Fan.


2024 Schnitzer Prize Recipient HONMI’s Zine Balconies series: Zine 01 (First edition). Credit: HONMI.


2024 Schnitzer Prize Recipient HONMI’s Zine Balconies series: Zine 01 (First edition). Credit: HONMI.


2024 Schnitzer Prize Recipient HONMI’s Balconies Balconies Balconies deployed in the Deer Island. Credit: Jie Fan.


2024 Schnitzer Prize Recipient HONMI’s Balconies, Balconies, Balconies exhibition opening at Rotch Library. Credit: HONMI.


2024 Schnitzer Prize Recipient HONMI’s Balconies, Balconies, Balconies exhibition opening at Rotch Library. Credit: Jabari Canada.


2024 Schnitzer Prize Recipient HONMI’s Balconies, Balconies, Balconies exhibition opening at Rotch Library. Credit: Jabari Canada.


2024 Schnitzer Prize Recipient HONMI’s Balconies Balconies Balconies performed in Deer Island. Credit: Jie Fan.

About the Artist

HONMI is an artist duo (Bryan Hon Ting Wong and Namhi Kwun) that seeks to expand the definition of spatial design by creating zines, furniture, exhibitions, and ephemeral spaces. Their work centers on art and architecture as a medium to promote awareness of geographical abstractions under modernism, revealing cultural disappearances, and expanding the definition of familiar lexicons with unfamiliar values.

Recently, their exhibition Balconies Balconies Balconies displayed in MIT Rotch Library have intervened the hidden space between the historic brick façade of MIT Building 7 and the library’s extension as a communal social balconies for faculty and students, the displayed artworks including zines, collages, and furnitures have emphasized the importance of locality and regionalism to the cultural influence of defining typologies.

All of their works are made collaboratively through the use of both physical and digital medium including wood crafting, furniture making, CAD modeling and drawing, as well as GIS spatial analysis. We believe that by pushing the boundaries and definitions of art and architecture, we could bring more awareness on social and environmental issues that are either intentionally hidden by modern states, or are disappearing from the public’s attention.

More at Bryan Hon Ting Wong and Namhi Kwun

Back to 2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts

Tele-Sky Unplugged

2023
Materials: sky, CRT TV casing, mirror, camera lens, diffuser

Tele-Sky Unplugged is a reinterpretation of Aldo Tambellini’s Tele-Sky (1981). The original piece showcased slow-scan transmissions of live sky images from three different countries, displayed on CRT TVs. In this recreation, the original telepresence art is presented in an unplugged form: a CRT TV is repurposed by replacing all its electronic components with a mirror and a lens. This allows its screen to reflect the immediate sky of the viewer’s environment, rather than electronically displaying distant skies via satellite transmissions, processed signals, and pixels.

The original Tele-Sky (1981) was a part of the Sky Art movement that peaked during the 1980s, centered at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT. The recreation extends the Sky Art artists’ exploration of the sky as a canvas to the sky itself as media—not just as a backdrop but as an integral part of our environmental and media landscape. It’s also a critique of the infrastructures silently integrating into our natural surroundings and the politics surrounding satellite technologies, as well as a dialogue between artists who lived under the Space Race and Cold War-era sky and the sky of today.

Learn more about the project

2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen’s Tele-Sky Unplugged. Courtesy of Zhani Chen.

Cloudbusting (Rain Poems)

2023
Materials: rain, water transfer printing paper (tattoo paper), paper, and ink

In Cloudbusting (Rain Poems), the writings of Peter Reich memorializing his deceased father and their shared memories of cloudbusting (making rain) were printed on water transfer paper and left outside to be affected by raindrops. The words that remained visible—selected by the raindrops in their pressure and rhythms—are perceived as the rain’s poetry and a means to connect.

This work explores how to perceive physically distant things, and how mourning persists in the natural and constructed environments around us. The rain’s traces become a dual medium: one that mediates between us and the clouds, and another that connects us to the notion of people we lost (a spiritualist who can communicate with the dead.) These traces suggest the desire to reconnect with our loved ones and how we might experience this desire in the environment through transference, dissociation, or interpretation, making elements in the environment conduits for connection. The asemic quality of the “poems” serves only to show us that the attempt to connect is futile; they reflect the absurdity and melancholy one might experience in trying, and the beauty in still trying despite the futility—a failure of language, an absence of meanings, and a longing for miracles.

2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen’s Cloudbusting (Rain Poems). Courtesy of Zhani Chen.

The Female Painter Who Fell in Love with Clouds Turned into a Cloud

2024
Materials: lace curtains, wood, canvas, acrylic, easel

GSD Kirkland Gallery, Cambridge, MA

This series of window/canvas installations is developed based on a fictional story under the same title. In the story, a female painter falls into limerent love with the clouds and views a satellite as her love rival. However, one day, she disappears from her home studio. The windows and painting tools found in her home studio have been brought back to the gallery space. Perhaps she transformed into a cloud and fled the desolation of her life, but that remains a mystery. The “windows” are actually reversed canvas that painted with the blue color of sky. They resemble windows but lead to nowhere, which seems to speak about a futile desire to dissociate from the anxieties of adult womanhood from a certain generation, and attach feelings to distant things—in this case, the environment where technology and nature intertwine.

“The lonely inhabitant of her room, a home-studio, fell in a crazy, limerent love with clouds. The weather satellite TIROS, according to the thoughts of the painter, is her unbearable rival in love, threatening her union with the cloud. She became a cunning detective, meticulously gathering all information about her rival. Her heart burnt with fury at the control and torment the satellite’s gaze imposed on her beloved cloud, yet she simultaneously experienced a wild joy in discovering the deeper resemblance with her cloud, as she too is a victim of patriarchy control. She believed that they were soulmates, bound by their striking similarities, and she prepared to love with all her tenderness. She kept painting clouds, slowly and lovingly, in defiance of the relentless production of cloud images by satellites. Is it an effort of an object trying to escape her own objectification? Or does it reflect a desire to be loved and saved in the same way? Perhaps her true desire was to become that beautiful, pure, white cloud, who has never been touched by the earth below, and her obsession with the cloud was her dissociation from the desolation of her life.”

2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen’s The Female Painter Who Fell in Love with Clouds Turned into a Cloud. Courtesy of Zhani Chen.