Greyson Hong: YOUR ONLY LIMIT IS YOU.

Artspace is pleased to present YOUR ONLY LIMIT IS YOU., a philosophical and mathematically-minded multimedia project by Greyson Hong, Artspace’s 2016-17 Artist-in-Residence. Produced in the wake of the 2016 Presidential Election, this new and ongoing body of work merges traditional and unconventional means of tracking data to map the artist’s social, ancestral, and economic networks, and measure her capacity for connecting with others.

For each study, Hong presents the viewer with concrete starting points: a given playing field, a set of rules, and tools for visualizing the data she collects.   She is the actor, animating each set with her body. Her studies range in topic, style and content, and include charts of her masculinity changing over time, recordings of number of times she has googled “protest”, and photographic studies of objects that fit her 5’6’’ embrace. Each study complicates the distinction between objective and empirical evidence. The information gathered is always relative to her body, speed and network.

Hong’s research into the theory of “Dunbar’s number” grounds this project. Proposed by British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990’s, the theory explores how many friends a person can maintain. Dunbar postures that this number is around one hundred and fifty for the average person, arguing that anything significantly above this number is too much for the human brain to optimally process.

Hong walks viewers through these experiments and data sets with care, providing footnotes that explain their logic.  As a whole, the studies measure and make visible the neurological and emotional forces that shape our capacity to love, feel shame, forgive, and experience grief.  The work is an intimate sample that when scaled up speaks volumes on who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.

About the Artist

Greyson Hong was born in Chicago and moved to New Haven in 20015 to teach New Media at the Educational Center for the Arts and Gateway Community College. She graduated with an MFA in Film, Video and Performance from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson (2014) after receiving a BFA in Studio Art from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007). Hong also studied at the Summer Studio Program at Oxbow School of Art (2004), with a concentration in Glass and Sculpture, and the United States Naval Academy (2002), with a concentration in Chemistry and Mathematics. She currently lives and works in New Haven.

Watch video of an artist talk by Greyson Hong on 11/10/17 at Artspace: