Hwang’s Korean heritage as well as her experience living and working in the United States influence her art-making. Instead of painting on canvas, she adheres buttons, beads, crystals, pins, and threads to Plexiglas and wooden panels. Ran’s work is both conceptual and practical, as she engages with Zen Buddhist ideology of repetition through the execution of her artistic process. For the most part, Hwang’s choice of materials allows her audience to become engaged in both viewing and sensorially exploring these assemblages at the same time.

Made of thousands of tiny buttons, crystals, beads, and threads on pins, rising just above the magnificent surfaces from which they protrude to cast shadows and paint pictures with pointillistic mastery; Ran Hwang’s work cascades. As they cascade, they charm, educate and surprise the onlookers. Her creations can be characterized as a series of isolated actions, often on walls, that combine to form larger works. Single particles join hands to meditatively create greater cascading movements or motion, waves of substance, fully present and somehow alive. Each piece is carefully placed to depict something like motion, with one layer positioned over another as intricate sub-events endlessly combine for an overall effect that is euphoric, transcendent and whole.

Hwang has transcended the meaning of “everyday use,” as she employs materials such as paper buttons to create intricate yet powerful depictions of natural beauty. Moved by the tragedies of 9/11 and more recently the Pandemic, Ran Hwang constructs imagery out of microcosms just as magically. She literally hammers together beaded visions driven by a personal mythology manifesting her own vision out of her own ideas, the Buddhist teachings and calligraphic skills that she observed in her father as a youngster merge with her need, in the wake of tragedy, to release emotion and potentially healing forces—an artistic balm for herself and for her audience—for what ails us all in the complex 21st century.