Being as a Woman

Being as a Woman emerges from Julia Hung’s ongoing inquiry into the tension between identity, expectation, and the structures that define womanhood. Hung has long employed techniques historically coded as “female domestic labor”—cooking, ironing, baking, crocheting, and weaving—not to fulfill prescribed roles but to subvert and reframe them. These actions become tools for questioning social value, ephemerality, and the philosophical conditions of being. Through ironing discarded plastics and weaving enameled copper wire, she transforms humble, overlooked materials into sites of existential and cultural reflection.

In this new woven sculpture, layered abstract biomorphic forms hover between organic growth and emotional entanglement, evoking both resilience and vulnerability. The title reflects a distinction central to Hung’s experience: being a woman as a biological identity, versus being as a woman as a role shaped by expectations that can feel imposed, unnatural, or incomplete. Through this work, she examines how femininity is performed, resisted, and continually redefined.