Phaan Howng currently has a massive site-specific installation Big Ass Snake(plant)s on a Plane, which is part of Inviting Light, curated by Derrick Adams in Baltimore (on view through summer 2026).
Howng is best known for her bold, colorful paintings, sculptures, and installations of plants with camouflage patterns that explore a post-human world.
While working a job in supply chain logistics for a third-party electronics manufacturer in South Florida, she began to observe the impact of global manufacturing on the environment. This experience has inspired her to explore how humans manipulate, control, conquer, and aestheticize the natural landscape for either personal gain or pleasure. She uses humor, along with her love of blockbuster movies and extensive research, to create her work, imagining an “optimistic post-apocalypse” world in which plants have taken over. The vivid colors are not only fun, but also reference how aposematism is found in plants and animals as a form of protection, along with camouflage as a modern war tactic used against future colonizers. Through her work, she invites the viewer to reflect on the human-plant relationship.
I’ve always been interested in Western civilization’s desire to control and contain plant life, treating them as if they were just objects versus actual living organisms. Snakes On a Plain was the title of the first series of work where I started focusing specifically on our relationships with houseplants and how they came to be, since they are the most objectified, and wanting to know everything about that history. Sharing the knowledge I come across is very important to me.
So when Derrick tapped me to do Inviting Light, I was excited to create Big Ass Snake(plant)s on a Plane (plain was changed to plane since they are growing the front plane of the building vs in a plain…and added ‘plants’ to the title since it is so public facing and I really want people to know that they’re snake plants…). It presented itself as an opportunity to fulfill a fantasy of mine to go full on sci-fi movie sublime spectacle. I understand that these topics can be super boring to most people and that it’s definitely not a public topic of interest (LOL) so I view any opportunity where my art can be seen by large groups of people to always be either fun, humorous, and entertaining–even though behind it is a lot of deeper meaning. I believe it makes learning about what I care about more accessible by creating a memorable experience. So for Inviting Light, I am literally highlighting what I care about while also illuminating Baltimore, its Station North Arts District, and its immediate area.
Phaan Howng
Big Ass Snake(Plant)s on a Plane transports the Charles Street Garage in Baltimore to a post-human world. Larger-than-life leaves with vivid colors and camouflage patterns are no longer passive objects of humans; they appear both aggressive and alien as they ‘grow’ out of the garage.
Her work is joined by four other site-specific installations by artists Zoë Charlton, Ekene Ijeoma, Tony Shore, and Wickerham & Lomax.
MORE: invitinglight.org
About the artist
Phaan Howng (she/her) is a Taiwanese American artist whose lush, botanical paintings and installations explore the complex histories of human-plant relationships—especially humanity’s desire to control, tame, and aestheticize nature. Her practice draws on ethnobotanical history, ecological research, and science fiction—particularly the grandeur of blockbuster action films and pop cultural spectacle—to imagine speculative ecosystems where plants push back.
Using camouflage, a tactic of modern warfare, rendered in vivid, hyper-saturated colors, Howng’s work makes flora appear both seductively radiant and ominously militant—simultaneously revealing and concealing. Plants are armored, invasive, and empowered, overwhelming the canvas and spilling into immersive installations. She calls this vision “optimistic post-apocalypse”: a post-human world in which plant life reclaims its autonomy and agency. In reimagining these entangled futures, Howng challenges the superficial ways humans objectify plants, advocating instead for a more attentive and reciprocal ecological consciousness.
Howng lives and works in Baltimore, MD. She received her BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2004 and her MFA from the Mt. Royal School of Art at MICA in 2015. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include presentations at the Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), Smithsonian Gardens in collaboration with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery (DC), Dinner Gallery (NYC), PRACTICE (Philadelphia), MonoPractice (Baltimore), Art in Buildings (NYC), the Asian Arts and Culture Center (Towson, MD), and MoCA Arlington (VA).
Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at M+B Gallery (Los Angeles), OCHI Gallery (Los Angeles and Sun Valley), Sean Kelly Gallery (New York and Los Angeles), the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industry Building (DC), and the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery at the Bloomberg Center (DC). Commissions include CityCenterDC, American Express Platinum, and Meta.
