Victoria Jang – Flushings Flora / Victoria Jang – Flushings Flora

Work

Press Release

Exhibition dates: February 11 through March 18, 2017.

Reception: Saturday, February 11 from 3 to 6pm.

Victoria Jang’s ceramic sculptures embody the complex hybridization of American-Korean culture. First generation Korean American, Victoria Jang grew up in the eastern border of Bergen County, New Jersey, one of the major hubs of the Korean’s in North America. The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 led most Chinese, Taiwanese and Koreans to surround the Hudson River.  Jang’s parents owned a small grocery store in Manhattan and frequented Flushing, a neighborhood in the NYC boroughs of Queens which became one of the epicenters of Korean communities.  Her experience navigating a multi-cultural environment prompted her to embark on an exploration of the multiplicity of Americanness.

In Jang’s first exhibition with PSG, Flushings Flora, she explores the ubiquitous family operated beauty supply stores, the proliferation of which became synonymous with Korean American businesses in Black communities. Merging traditional Korean ceramic techniques, Jang morphs abstract sculptural forms into complex tangles of nails. Along with the sculptural forms, Jang’s humanized landforms explore the interwoven and complex relationship of the Black & Korean communities and businesses that dominated the phenomenon of the beauty supply industry. Jang’s work is a complex weave of expectations, and misconceptions of transitioning communities.

Victoria Jang received her BFA in ceramics and sculpture from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2010. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and received her MFA in ceramics at the California College of the Arts in 2014. Jang received a Headlands Graduate Fellowship Award, Murphy Award and Cadogen Scholarship and was the featured artist for the 2014 Apature exhibition at Kearny Street Workshop. She is a Visiting Artist in Residence for 2015-2016 at the University of California, Berkeley.

PSG has a small exhibition room, 12 x 12 feet, with one barn wood wall. We invited Matthew Floriani, a second year MFA candidate at Mills College in Oakland, CA to present an installation of wood and found objects suggesting make-shift housing used by many, uninhabited and uninhabitable. Matthew describes his structures, ” as if something has been taken, a place to belong and a longing for something missing.”

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