Young Do Jeong
Jack In The Box, 2011, Oil, enamel, acrylic, oil stick, and marker on canvas,
50.25 x 40 inches
Shooting Star, 2011,
Materials: Oil, enamel, acrylic, and spray paint on shaped linen,
canvas, and panel, 48 x 61 inches
Aritst Statement
The aesthetics in my paintings mainly consist of collage, Pop Art, and Abstract Expressionism. These are mélange from my personal experience of having my life shifted from a homogeneous society of Korea to a heterogeneous culture of the United States. Liberation from Japanese occupation in 1945 and the breakout of the Korean War in 1950 to 1953 led to the birth of modern Korea. Since then, Korea has continued to absorb and adapt Western ideas through the rapid process of industrialization and modernization. Growing up in Seoul, I went through the highly vibrant period of the late 1990s and early 2000s as a young adolescent actively participating in the mixture of Korean traditions and Western values--which became my main visual vocabularies.
For me, painting is a stage set. By adding and subtracting paints and by destroying and organizing the surface, the set sometimes gets out of control. However, it restores the balance as I patiently work on it. The means of expression range from cartoonish figures to varied brush strokes, sometimes from photographic images and ideational diagrams from Korea. Each visual component is directly transferred onto the canvas from an original source and filtered with my personal memory. Although narrative is evident in the stage production, there is no pre-plan of locating the formal elements. In the painting Plz (2010), I adopted the original form of Frank Stella’s protractor, inspired by its unique shape and color. To me, the adopted forms function as characters or backgrounds in a play. The protractor plays the role of the earth and heaven, which signifies the connection of birth and death and refers to the Korean burial site. Black and white half circles in Plz represents the transitory moment in life. Subsequently a boy praying in between the protractors and the half circles tells the story of what it feels like to be a stranger in an unfamiliar land. In Not yet?! (2010), a canvas and an a-shaped panel are horizontally attached. The canvas is fully covered with stripes of multiple colors, and the panel is barely painted. These two different surfaces are completely distinguished, but physically connected to trigger a narrative of an individual arguing with another in a transitory space.
Forming play with characters and employing dialogues compose the stage sets. When I approach them with a more open mind, they become fresh-breathing live entities. Each stage of my work attempts to go beyond the conventional shape of painting by devising shaped canvas or using multiples and joining them together. The physical presence of the canvas and the layers of my cultural experience create synergistic effects, thus completing the whole painting. These independent spaces are intertwined with the images in various modes of expression and tell the story as if each chapter gets slowly integrated into the entire plot.
My paintings are naturally embedded with my initial reactions of being exposed to different cultural environment; loneliness, nervousness, humiliation, and frustration. I adopt the metaphor of living in diverse cultures and literally create a space by colliding distinct entities in the stage set. By putting modified images and canvases together, each stage does not tell the narration immediately. However, as an entire play is composed with several different chapters, my painting allows me to share this ordinary yet distinctive story through allegories. It is not only with the people who went through similar experiences, but also those with an entirely different experience and perspective. My ultimate goal is to compose a stage set to show how I connect myself to the world through allegorical play.
More information available at youngdojeong.com