Ina Jang dislikes disorder. Almost everything about her work is meticulous and elegant. Because she knows how to combine aesthetics and innovation, she has been labeled an unclassifiable artist operating somewhere between fashion and fine art, incorporating drawing, graphic design and sculpture into her photographs. Both playful and poetic, this South Korean’s work is composed of images that start out with figures and then, little by little, fade into surrealist environments, stimulated by a multitude of elements and objects. Her gentle use of colors and surfaces creates a complex and multidimensional world in which reality and fiction intertwine. This contemporary approach is currently on display at her first solo exhibition, all roses are red, all birds are blue, at the Foley Gallery in New York.
The portraits and still lifes explore the theme of identity, which she conceals from the first image to the last, often drawn with a ballpoint pen in a Moleskine notebook that has been her faithful companion since her years at the School of the Visual Arts in New York. This ambiguous style suggests a dreamlike world where the game of representation, humor and pure fun are key. The ideas emerge on paper before turning into shots, cuts, folds, collage and color. Much of the work is done physically, as in her portraits where she has her model pose in a cardboard mask, but she also relies on digital postproduction. One constant is her taste for simplicity. “Everyone works with Photoshop. Typically, the images are retouched to accentuate reality. I’ve always liked innovation, but with a touch of sobriety. At the beginning, I stupidly thought: why not use the paint tool?”
In this series, Jang has not forgotten the fundamentals that brought her to fame. We see recurrent motifs like peas, clouds, ill-defined shapes and masks. To “cover her tracks” in her photographs, Jang often resorts to a second dimension. In reality, everything is possible. Therein lies the power of her photography. “I make images that are minimal and two-dimensional by layering people, places and things to precisely execute ideas, but with the intention of discarding information,” she says. “As I want the ideas to be tangible, the process becomes rigorously physical and related to my personal experience in terms of making photographs; it often contains cutting, gluing and pasting mundane objects from real life, such as paper and cotton balls. The photographs are often figurative and unidentified, casting a suspicion upon the photograph’s agenda. I allow the viewers to question whether they are truly subjects or merely objects. I investigate poetic and surreal relationships among things, places and womanhood. Peeling an apple at once without stopping in the middle, or looking at a pyramid from the sky in a small propeller plane…these are things experienced in real life but still manage to stay distant from who I am.”
EXHIBITION
all roses are red, all birds are blue d’Ina Jang
From February 25th to April 12th, 2015
Foley Gallery
59 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
(212) 244-9081
