Ran Hwang: Pins and Buttons Murals

Ran Hwang is a Korean-born artist currently living in New York creates incredible wall installations using buttons and pins. She creates oversized intricate murals of birds and owls that look like a collection of pixels on a screen seen on up close, but from afar it all comes together as a one amazing piece of art. 

Artist's statement: "The process of building large installations are time consuming and repetitive and it requires manual effort which provides a form of self-meditation. I hammer thousands of pins into a wall like a monk who, facing the wall, practices Zen. My works are divided into two groups. In the first, pins are used to hold buttons remain free to move and suggest the genetic human tendency to be irresolute. I choose buttons, which are as common and ordinary as human beings. In the second group of works, a massive number of pins connect yards of thread creating a negative space of the presented images, threads suggesting connections between human beings and a communication network between seemingly unlinked human experiences. The filled negative space in the absence of the positive space suggests mortality at the heart of self-recognition".