Phaan Howng

The Baltimore-based artist Phaan Howng received a BFA from Boston University and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). This year, she is the McMillan Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting at MICA. Solo exhibitions include I’ll Be Back at Dinner Gallery (2022), You’re in Good Hands at Spring/Break Art Show (2019), The Succession of Nature at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2017), and large-scale public installations and commissions. In T Magazine, Aileen Kwun observed that Howng’s fluorescent plants, paintings, wallpaper, furniture, and installations evoke “a sort of despairing joy—an end-of-days, rave-party aplomb.”

Phaan Howng in Conversation with Marcus Civin

October 7, 2022

Phaan, can you talk about how you paint the way you do—that signature Phaan Howng mark-making?

After grad school I got into researching the effects of war on the environment. And during that time I started wondering how the planet would arm itself to protect it from future colonizers with modern day war tactics which led me into this camouflage rabbit hole. Somehow I inherently started to use this line work to suggest camouflage. I think it’s because after undergrad, I went to Taiwan for a month. I was so bored, and my mom asked me if I wanted to take a class to learn Chinese calligraphy painting. In the class, they taught me how to hold the brush, how to apply pressure, and move my arm. It’s all about holding your wrist still and this up-and-down motion while dragging the brush. You get the heavy line when you put pressure down. To get thinner lines, you raise your arm. You can’t have a floppy wrist. The entire time, the teacher is yelling at you, “You’re not holding your wrist right!!” Eventually, it just worked for me, and I realized I enjoyed it. It stuck. It became this language where everything is loosey-goosey at first, and then I go in with fine-line detail. It’s a three-, four-, five-, six-step process of layering. I don’t want anyone to associate me directly with Chinese painting though, because I don’t want to be stereotyped. When I was in grad school, I was making long vertical paintings, and visiting critics would say, “Oh, this is like a Chinese scroll painting.” And, I was like, “Is it because I’m Chinese? Would you have said that to someone white?” Eye roll! I don’t want to always tie my work to that. It’s not like I studied Chinese landscape painting intently for years and years. I only took classes for a month, for two hours a week. My work is about more than that.

The installation at Dinner Gallery in New York resulted from realizing that the front room of the space as a drawing parlor. It became the perfect place to think about the rise of houseplant cultivation in the late 1800s. Before that, people didn’t have houseplants. Only the super-mega-wealthy Victorians could afford houseplants because they could afford to build greenhouses. They were like, “look at this magic plant that came from South America or Australia!” Some people thought these plants would kill them in their sleep. There’s still this kind of exotification of plants. I see all these people wanting to be around plants because it makes them feel good—which is real. But, they go to high-end plant stores. Or, they go to Home Depot and buy a plant. They go to Whole Foods and come home with a plant. The plant becomes this commodified object. In Asia, there was this huge succulent craze. Greenhouses couldn’t keep up with the demand because succulents take time to grow. Poachers got caught on the California coast sticking succulents in the mail. In South Africa, there are certain plants that poachers dig up too. Why do we have superficial relationships with plants where we treat them like pets, but meanwhile, the greater environment we can’t care for? Why do we have to control nature and keep it in a pot to admire? The last room at Dinner Gallery was The Terminator room. My idea was that all the plants found their true selves, like in the Kate Chopin novel, The Awakening (1899), and then they traveled far into the future to kill all humans like in the Terminator movies (1984-2019). Some of the color palettes I chose were related to poisonous tree frogs. Some of the plant sculptures were aluminum and pointy, like weapons.

Do you want to talk about where you went to high school?

I went to Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—the big high school that had the Valentine’s Day shooting. I wasn’t surprised it happened. It was the type of high school that would set up the conditions for something like that to happen. When I was going there way before that, it was your stereotypical high school. You had your grungy kids hanging out in one place, the Asian club in another, and all the cheerleaders and athletes were together. It was toxic and separated along income brackets. There were kids who hung out by themselves and were completely isolated. I made three large paintings that were my way of processing and paying homage without being too upfront and confrontational about it. I didn’t want to be obvious. Like much of my work, they were landscapes. The show was Effigy, Elegy, Eulogy at Arlington Arts Center in 2018. The paintings were called: Land That Knows No Parting, Dying Ember, and In the Twilight Glow I see them (Hugging Trees), which are all Willie Nelson lyrics. I went through a Willie Nelson phase at that time. His songs made sense with my mood.

That totally makes sense. It also makes sense, given the continuum of your work, that you would stick to landscape. I’ve seen you talk about your early paintings, like the one of your father doing yard work.

I start all my artist lectures now by showing the first paintings I did. I was interested early on in the manipulation of nature. Why do we have to have lawns? What is that pristine space? I even made these drawings that mocked people doing yard work. I read W. J. T. Mitchell’s Theses on Landscape (1994): “Landscape is a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other… Landscape is a medium found in all cultures. Landscape is a particular historical formation associated with Euro­pean Imperialism…” Landscape is political. That has been my guide in going into different subject matter, and I think my landscapes are portraits of humanity even though I don’t show humans any more. Looking at the paintings, you’re embedded in the landscape, getting a close-up, and you can’t escape. I try to bring my painting world into the real world and have it live and grow. 

Do you think we’re doomed?

PH: I do a lot of research into topics and subtopics around the environment. I feel like lately there has been some better news, and I have been trying to stay positive like, “Oh, this bill passed.” But, I look at my kids, and I feel terrible. Trump was able to undo so many things quickly. To go back and re-do all those things he has undone is a painful process. With all these climate criminals in power—Bolsonaro in Brazil, DeSantis in Florida—what I fear most is people suffering. People are already suffering from climate change. The slow violence, and watching it unfold, makes me pessimistic sometimes. We need larger institutional actions from large companies that push consumption. They could make big changes happen but choose not to. There are other problems too. I think about supply chains. For instance, with solar panels or electric cars, you still have to do some kind of mining from the earth for parts that probably come with horrible, low-wage working conditions, produce a lot of toxic waste or destroy the local ecology. I don’t know what the balance is. Solar panels might be a solution for the future, but where are we going to get everything we need to make the panels? I can get myself wrapped up and go into a downward spiral.

You and I have talked before about the artist's life. I wonder if you can describe the perfect artist day for you?

The perfect day is getting to the studio early enough, before 9:00 am, and being able to work straight, painting for a ten-hour day. I just go into a zone. I can have a good moment, everything working out perfectly, all the paint going on well. I might not have to stop. Yesterday was almost perfect. I got close to finishing one painting and then set it down and picked up another painting that I had stopped working on because I didn’t know what to do with it. I decided to try something out and go for it, and it turned out nice. It’s a baby. It’s 8 by 10 inches, neon red, orange, and black. It’s a palm but kind of slasher-ish. I’m impressed with myself on the drop shadows! 

What are you working towards right now?

I’m working on a show opening in December for Practice Gallery in Philadelphia that I am super excited about. I usually do giant labor intensive installations and have been wanting to do a “just paintings” show for forever. I laid some boundaries down with myself for this show as well since I’ve always made something too big that requires a van and then becomes a pain in the ass to store. So, this time I told myself that everything had to fit into this giant rolling suitcase that I have so I can roll them on the train from Baltimore to Philly. I am making a group of paintings inspired by short stories about plant horror written in the Victorian era—H.G. Wells, Nathaniel Hawthorne… I like that plants can be scary. You’re in the woods in the middle of the night, things are rustling around.

I feel weird going from a huge scale to itty-bitty on linen. I’ve been having an identity crisis. My whole schtick was “go big or go home.” But, I can’t handle the stress and impacts of making and transporting all of that work right now. 

I think it can be important to distill your message. I’m sure the small pieces will be exquisite. And, I bet there will be a lot of them.

Yeah. There will be a lot. And, I’m painting over these fake vines that will be strung across the wall.

You told me once about how you want to lure viewers in and use some of the tools of spectacle to make tense and complicated situations more approachable.

That’s my sense of humor and my love of blockbuster action movies with lots of explosions. I need to have humor as a way to help myself deal with these depressing topics. I feel like everyone needs it. The world is so depressing right now, so why would anyone want to be even more depressed when looking at art? But also, I’ve always wanted my work to be as accessible to everyone as possible, not just for an art audience.That’s why I never wanted painting to be on a strictly 2D plane. That’s limiting for me and in my opinion, limits everyone else’s imagination or definition of what painting is. Fabian Marcaccio and Greg Lynn’s Predator (2001)—a painted plastic architectural sculptural painting—really inspired that. Other paintings by Marcaccio come out of the window or turn corners. Painting should be like that! That’s still painting.