Today we’d like to introduce you to Jin Young Jeong.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I am from Seoul, South Korea. I was born and raised in Seoul for 19 years. In my twenty-four years of life, I have spent nine years for Korean traditional dance, but I started studying art after I saw the exhibition of Hundert Wasser in Seoul. The show stimulated my interest in artworks mainly focused on the visual elements of non-authoritative and liberal colors.
Thus, I decided to attend an art school where I ended up graduating from School of the Art Institute of Chicago(SAIC) in May 2017. Moving to Chicago helped me to broaden my knowledge and experience through the continuous and persistent practice of art.
The main focus of my works is utilizing the wide range of colors to describe semi-representative human body figures. I am interested in how the body occupies space and what the body articulates through the connections of a series of gestures. I began a series based upon subjects familiar to me, my friends, my lover, or my mother.
I believe that in their distinct occupation of space, they emanate an energy. Some have equated this with an “aura”. In my work, I attempt to disseminate this energy through the use of color, line, layers of different mediums and form.
After I graduated from the school, I realized that how much my relationships with people impacts on my thought process and my art practice. Thus, I’ve ended up believing that I can define my value through space, relationships and time that I share with people. I try to follow the belief that life is co-existence.
By creating paintings where I define how I perceive others, I express and validate the value of my existence. I examine subliminal individual qualities by delineating body movement with exclusive color palettes and various surfaces through layers. I believe that a person’s distinctiveness and complex personality is revealed perfectly where different mediums, colors, and organic forms come together.
My unrestricted sense of color combination allows me to create tension and people’s identifiable energy in my artworks with the passionate aspects of color.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It hasn’t been smooth at all. I steadily have to criticize my own works objectively to develop and compensate any weakness in my paintings. My works initially started with the face portraitures of people around me while I was in the school. But I felt limitations with characterizing people through their faces.
Due to questioning to myself constantly, I became curious about whether my subjects’ identities would be exposed if I went beyond facial expressions to depict their postures and tendencies. I realize that Body gestures, especially those of the legs, are likely to expose people’s true sentiments, as during the course of the day they would try to be in their most comfortable positions while they sat and slept.
Moreover, I’ve broadened my subjects by including strangers from my mundane routine. My current work is a result of recalling leg shapes from strangers, with whom I do not interact but with whom I share the same space. I examine their unique physical features rather than their characters and rely on memory to conceive the forms in my compositions.
Portraying strangers’ legs allows me to exclude my emotions and to enlarge my study of figures and figurative shapes. I seek to find how my relationship with strangers differs in comparison to the intimate relationships in my previous body of works. Modifying the subject matter from faces to strangers’ body parts generates a distinct combination of colors and diverse surfaces.
Jin Jeong – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I am a Chicago based artist who makes mainly painting and drawing with the broad spectrum of colors and organic shapes.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
I personally think that being a successful artist is very subjective. It depends on what is the artist’s final goal to achieve in their art practice or artist career. I ultimately desire to be a female artist who creates influential artworks that become a significant reference to work in color for other artists.
Thus, for now, I am planning to go to a graduate school in the next year. I think that going to MFA will help me to establish a disciplined art-making environment with in-depth research. The plan will provide an opportunity to strengthen my knowledge of color and the visual components and to enhance my thought and perspective through theoretical ideas for my art practice to accomplish my successful goal.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1942 S. Halsted St UNIT# 2F
- Website: http://jin-jeong.com
- Phone: 3128349303
- Email: jinjeong1120@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/j_jinn_
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jinyoung.jeong93
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