Immaterial Fantasies: Jang Unui

Since some time ago, we have distanced ourselves from the genuine experience of art. An artist and numerous artistic apparatus are disruptions. What is art? Artist Unui Jang has sought an answer for that question. She looked back and realized that she has been hard-pressed to show something new and great rather than appreciating the joy of simple communication. Jang in the past worked with video art, but now she seeks to return to her mindset when she began making art , “I became an artist, because I like drawing.” Thus, her new plan is a journey to the picture.

In the process, she proposes multiple hypotheses. In previous work, she took an audience’s eyes and an artist’s hands as independent variables in her hypotheses. In 2008, Jang drilled a hole inside of an empty frame on the wall so that viewers could look through to see the landscape outside. In the project, to the eyes of the viewers, the artist solely exists as a mediator that emphasizes the subject. By making a gallery space go-between, she presented the eyes of viewers as a subject and piece of work simultaneously. Jang therefore collapsed the conventional relations between artist/work/viewer. In Project Players, Unui Jang tracked down other artists’ hands as a parent population for the experiment. By carrying through philosophical and aesthetic contexts around art and through the presentation of artists making (moment), she attempted to find meaning in redundant actions in making art. Unui Jang states that a painting is like a thinking hand for an artist, revealing that even redundant actions around art are indeed productive. She thus proves a statistic fact about her own hypotheses.

Another independent variable in the project are choices of the artist. This exhibition Immaterial Fantasies is the experiment. She collects everyday sentiments and debris to establish more specific and proving procedures for a condition and theory of painting related to a touching moment. Photographs are the preliminary sources. Through the medium of photography, a convenient tool of civilization, a touching moment that affected the artist becomes a record mixed with thought and emotion. Despite this idea, she also claims that photography as a tool of representation has taken genuine moments away from her. Hence, she brings the lost moments back on canvas by making it into painting. Her memory about a table (on which mom’s boats, a warm candy, and mom’s star are laid) recalls her mom’s love and dedication. Other memories such as a coldish blue mountain reminds her of when she saw a gas station with a “self” sign, which seemed to draw an analogy for her to the life lesson that we ought to grow on our own. Likewise, her memories about cleaning 1, 2, 3 rewind time backward to the days when she learned that she can begin life anew by emptying herself. An oasis contained on her palm is stamped on Jang’s memory as a symbol on a map. The artist Jang, for the desire for eternality, draws every day images recorded by intuition, imprinting as well as refreshing a moment.

Jang casually remembers an old photo album: “An album is a little place where my special moments are stored and shown to others, where temporality and permanence only recognized by myself overlap each other, stretching out discontinuously.” Jang re-composes fragments of everyday life in the same way that she organizes an album. Only are those selected moments in the process of verification reborn as a painting. The reason behind pressing the source images via a projector in the exhibition space is to touch upon the issues of a representation/re-presentation in art. However, unlike those who brag about their lives on SNS, Jang, deeply fond of painting, reproduces a momentary thought and feeling on canvas, challenging (impossibly) the notion of morality. The images that she produces on canvas are not superficial, explanatory, and specific. The way that she tracks times back to the past, prior to the completion of the works in the process of creation, makes everyday objects in her works appear covered with memory and time. It is like we read a sense of realistic everydayness from an old photograph and are reminded of times passing. Her paintings in subtle colors feel to us comfortable, freeing themselves from heavy/dark subject matter, such as history.

Jang wishfully says that, “I would rather draw a rainbow-colored umbrella found on the road rather than a rainbow in the sky.” This statement shows us that she wants to reproduce casual elements that provide us with immaterial fantasies rather than a high artistic ideal. Also, she lets us experience two different types of representation: a momentary representation on the wall (via a projector) and a continuing re-presentation on the canvas (via paintings) proving to her own hypotheses of how a choice she makes as an artist determines things. Immaterial Fantasies by Unui Jang succeeded in confirming to the artistic insight, to the justification for her project that seeks meanings in between every day and art, emptiness and beauty, ephemerality and continuity.

Yunjo Park (Art critic), 2014