Hana Locks art will show streams of creative consciousness, from ink tests to doodles of bones, muscles, and flesh. From one leaf to the next, these pages are a proving ground for inspiration. More often than not, the mundane musings of daily life remain journal-bound, while more macabre meditations find their way into her body of work. Lock’s artwork, a mixture of ballpoint pen and paint, generally explores the thin semblance of flesh that separates life and death, the physical from the spiritual.
“When I was little, I was really scared of skeletons. I distinctly remember having nightmares about them. Death and skulls scared the hell out of me.”
The permanence of ink is counterbalanced by ruminations on the impermanence of flesh found in her large two-dimensional drawings. Her compositions combine science and fantasy, depicting intricate interpretations of human and animal anatomy peeled back in melted layers that illustrate the inner workings of bone and muscle, intertwined with blooming floral arrangements, fetuses, or a persistent frog hidden within the layers. “Pretty much all my pieces have at least one or two frogs hidden in there. I think it just makes the viewing experience more fun. My pieces are pretty dark, but I like adding a playful element,” she explains.
Despite her current interest in the decomposition of anatomical forms, Hana recalls a time when she feared what happened beneath the skin. “When I was little, I was really scared of skeletons. I distinctly remember having nightmares about them,” Hana says. “Death and skulls scared the hell out of me.” Hana grew up in Sunnyvale and began drawing at a young age. “I would draw cute little cartoons, Totoro, Pokémon, just like cute animals. I think the catalyst for everything was when I was 14.” At 14, Hana wandered into the California Academy of Sciences’ Skulls exhibit while visiting San Francisco with her parents. The exhibition showcased over 600 skulls from various creatures and a display that demonstrated how dermestid beetles would devour the flesh from bones, turning skulls into specimens. “I saw the exhibition and thought, ‘this is beautiful and interesting.’ It’s like morbid curiosity in a way that sucked me in, and I never left,” she recalls.
Hana’s parents have long supported her creative practice. “They were never really put off by my interest in dead things. They were really forgiving and supportive. I’m lucky. I think it’s because my dad grew up with that Asian immigrant family mindset of ‘you have to be successful.’ He decided, ‘I’m not doing that with my kids.’ ” That support from her family led Hana to earn a BFA in fine and studio arts and pictorial arts from San José State University in 2022. While in school, she rode the wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was different. We thought we would be back in a couple of weeks, but that never happened,” she says. Lockdown made classes difficult and reduced her access to studio facilities. However, she did find inspiration in her time at home, which allowed her to go big with her compositions. “At home, I would work on six by eight pads of paper and tape another piece on and keep taping and taping until I had a big piece. I realized that I could make these drawings into full-fledged pieces.”
She defined her voice in the works she produced for her BFA show, some of which also made their way into her 2024 solo exhibition at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara. “I started to get a better idea of what I wanted to draw in that last semester,” Hana says. “It was like a light bulb went off—ballpoint pen plus anatomy plus flat colors helped bring it all together.” Hana had previously submitted work to the Triton Museum’s annual Salon and 2D Art Competition & Exhibition while in college, but was finally accepted in 2023. Her 2022 piece, Guren, won best in show at the Salon, awarding her a solo exhibition in one of Triton’s galleries. Guren is a large six-foot by two-foot piece that includes ballpoint pen, acrylic, watercolor, ink, and gold foil spanning across four wooden panels. A gold foil snake winds through the composition—its body coiled through various stages of putrescence.
There is an anthropomorphic corpse, a melting skull, and a mammal fetus, all being reclaimed by sprawling foliage. On one end, the snake’s mouth is held open by a frog; on the other, the snake’s tail is a human head, mouth probed by another of the twelve frogs in the piece. Grim visages of babies, some with horns, seem to watch the piece unfold, as if the lesser-told and often gruesome cycle of life is washed across the panels. “I try to balance the grotesqueness with beauty.” Despite the macabre nature of her work, Hana is generally inspired by scientific curiosity. She levels her depictions of taboo topics with ethical consciousness, especially when referencing source materials. “I like to look at these things from a more scientific lens. Biological illustrations and medical models are a huge inspiration,” she says. “As long as they are either really old, medical models, mummies, or they’re donated, I think it’s fine. I don’t like crime documentaries. That kind of gratuitousness feels a little icky.”
Aside from human forms, Hana’s work is also inspired by Japanese culture and art. She grew up around Japanese Buddhism and Shintoism, which has found its way into her pieces. “My mom is Japanese Buddhist, so I grew up seeing cool-looking deities—big statues of Buddha, warriors, gods, demons, and folklore about death and reincarnation. I think that bled over into my work before I realized it.” Despite the inability to explore printmaking in depth while in college, Hana still hopes to translate her work into prints, citing Japanese printmaking as a significant influence. “That’s why everything is 2D in my work,” she explains. “I want to return to printmaking if I can find the materials and time. I respect craftsmen, and I have always wanted to be one—using traditional processes and working in my workshop.”
Hana still subscribes to her practice of sketchbooking, which is the foundation for her current work. In many ways, her dissection of biomechanics and investigation of organic processes such as decomposition are parallel to her intuitive creative processes. “When I start a piece, it’s usually just a sketch or a doodle that I think is nice, and I’ll convert it into a bigger sketch and go from there. I won’t know what I’m doing until the end. You can call it poorly planned—poorly planned, spontaneous, or organic.” When you flip through Hana’s sketchbook, her process is fully displayed. Between pages of notes and bubbly ballpoint bunnies, you can see components of her larger compositions. “Eighty percent of it is kind of garbage, but the other twenty percent is pretty good. It’s just somewhere to throw up ideas. It helps clear my mind. Sketchbooks are a huge part of my process. I think it’s underappreciated. That’s my advice for young artists: keep a sketchbook.”
As Hana recovers from her 2024 solo exhibition, Anatomica, at the Triton, she works as a substitute teacher in the South Bay, where she grew up. She hopes to earn an MFA but generally wants to “make a living and be able to make art. That’s all I want to do. As long as I’m drawing, I think I’m happy.” When asked what she thinks of ‘macabre’ as an adjective to describe her work, she simply shares, “Morbid, macabre, grotesque—all good.”
Instagram: hana_lock_studios