statement

Originally from South Korea, Yunsung Jang studied Fine Art at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He moved to New York City in 2011 to attend the New York Academy of Art where he completed his MFA in drawing. He was awarded a Postgraduate Fellowship at the New York Academy of Art in 2013. His work was selected for the BP Portrait Award Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has also exhibited at Kraine Gallery, New York; Art Southampton, New York; Flowers Gallery, New York; Waterhouse Gallery, California, and Woeske Gallery, Berlin. He has been featured in International Artist Magazine, The Figure: Painting Drawing and Sculpture, and Strokes of Genius 4: The Best of Drawing.

My work is about the reconstruction of memories, built both internally and externally. Internally the work is made from my memory of the subject, the emotion of experience, and through reflection of myself. Because of the constraints of time and space, I can only access one segment of another person, one version of their personality, one environment of their life. These fragments build my experience and memory of a subject. The external construction is more about the expression of presence through physicality, mass, and form. I am interested in how a picture can replicate a living being, interpreting the subject's internal and external qualities in communion with my own. My goal is that this composite becomes a new creation, a new creature. The paintings in this exhibition signify not only my friends, but the uniqueness of my experience of them, and the time and space that we shared in the past.

bio

born: 1977, Seoul, South Korea

education

New York Academy of Art, MFA, 2013
Academy of Art University, BFA, 2011

selected awards/honors

BP Portrait Visitor's Choice Award Winner, National Portrait gallery, London, 2014
Fellowship Award, New York Academy of Art, 2013

selected publications

The Figure: Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture. Donald Kuspit, Margaret McCann, Skira Rizzoli, 2014
BP Portrait award 2014 Exhibition, National Portrait gallery, 2014

selected group shows

Flowers Gallery, Small is beautiful, New York, New York, 2014
Panepinto Galleries, Lucid Vison, Jersey City, New Jersey, 2014
Wilkinson Gallery, Fellows, New York, New York, 2014
Sotheby's, Take home a Nude, New York, New York, 2014