Ran Hwang seeks meditation through button artworks

“Another Myself,” an installation using buttons, pins, beads and threads on wooden panels, created by Ran Hwang / Courtesy of Ran Hwang

Ran Hwang

By Chung Ah-young

When Ran Hwang worked at an embroidery company in New York in the early 2000s, she found some abandoned buttons covered with dust in the corner.

She thought these lifeless, worthlessly abandoned objects were just like her because she was struggling to find her identity while working for a living as an artist at the time.

To enliven these objects, she picked up the buttons, pins and thread and began making a figure of a Buddha, a temple, a bird and other designs.

“When we lose a tiny button, we realize that for the first time how precious it is. I think the existence of an individual human has a similar meaning as a button,” she said.

“Furthermore, buttons are tied with pins. It is similar to the limited freedom of humans in society.”

New York-based artist Hwang is renowned for her unique art installations using buttons and pins which evoke feminine and meditative features.

After moving to New York in 1997, she has created a time-consuming, manual handiwork as a “meditative” discipline conducive to inner peace.

The artist said she has to use a great deal of time and effort to create her work. “In order to transmit the meaningful life of an individual human into a bead, I hammer thousands of pins into wooden panels like a monk who is facing the wall and loses himself in a deep concentration.”

Unlike other works, her installation is torn down after the exhibition is over. But she said that she finds transient beauty in her works because all things that fade are more precious in the present.

“I couldn’t imagine exactly what it would look like before I finished a piece in the earlier practice,” she said.

Hwang said banging and nailing hundreds of buttons in place from top to bottom, left to right, and waving her arms in repetitive action, is like a “ceremony to empty the mind.”

“Buttons are fixed by pins on my artwork, as if we are all bound by society. But when they settle on their spot, they appear to be meditating,” she said.

Initiated from self-observation and meditation, her creative process is like a therapeutic experience, she said. “I want to convey this amazing feeling through my creation and hopefully the audience would feel that way when they view my artwork.”